And once they have done that in triplicate, I might answer the phone.

I'm with all of you - not in contacts, not gonna pick up the call.

But I read about a situation which would probably open the doors a bit...

see https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/12/02/toronto-public-librar...

A girl got lost. She wanted to call her mom, but the girl had left her phone at home. So she went to the library to phone her mom. The librarian refused to let the girl make a call. [N.B. Yes, the librarian got in hot water for that move]

The girl eventually convinced a stranger to let the girl call her mom using the stranger's phone.

The mom, who was frantically trying to locate her daughter, took the call even though it was from an unknown number.

How many people would make an exception in that case of an unknown number calling?

>> The mom, who was frantically trying to locate her daughter, took the call even though it was from an unknown number.

>> How many people would make an exception in that case of an unknown number calling?

Duh! What a stupid question. Almost everyone in extreme distress due to losing their child would take anything, call, stranger knocking at the door, medium talking to the ether. Anything! :)

I get this is an Idiocracy-level type of question: "If you have one bucket that contains 2 gallons and another bucket that contains 7 gallons, how many buckets do you have?"

That's the point - all the people who said, "Not in contact list, do not pickup" (including me), did they think about an exception list?

I know I didn't. Short-sighted reaction after getting inundated with mandarin-speaking spammers.

I don't know what the globally correct answer is. But "never pickup" seems too extreme (even if the person, calling on the unknown number, leaves a voicemail, if you can't reach them with a return call, what then?)

Well at least where I live, the obvious exception to "don't pickup unknown numbers" rule is shipping services. Some of my online orders will arrive by courier and their drivers will call me when they arrive near my flat so I go out and pick my package. Completely unknown random numbers although companies do have the option to associate phone numbers with caller ID so I can see it's a delivery service. But by some reason (cost, convenience, no idea), they don't.

I can usually infer from the fact that I made an online order, sometimes they'll send me an SMS prior to sending but not always. Anyhow I did have my share of picking spam calls because of the necessity to ignore the "no unknowns" rule while expecting a package.

Overall I don't get that many calls yet that I'd have to configure the phone to reject ALL numbers not in the phone book. But call spam is definitely increasing, along with plain scam. I almost got my card stolen by a post office spoofing scam. And recently my bank cancelled my card and had to get a new one after someone from US tried to buy jewelry with it (I live in Romania) - probably leaked from one of the many online services I pay for. Now I switched to single-one-time-use cards from Revolut for all non-recurring payments, unfortunately it's too much of a hassle to do so for recurring ones. And with increasing security vulnerabilities my only protection is separate bank accounts and keeping only small amounts of money on the account linked to the debit card. No credit, only debit.

>The girl eventually convinced a stranger to let the girl call her mom using the stranger's phone.

She could send an SMS.

All the important stuff comes by either certified mail or a legal process server.

I only accept and send Horde Mail.

A personalized Viking Raider takes your package on a saga to your chosen destination, looting and pillaging on the way while yelling battlecries and occasionally throwing an axe.

Extra charge if longboat is required.

Yeah, but I bet they just pass any resulting weregild right back on to the customer...