1 Jun 2001 rupert   » (Journeyer)

Humor me while I rant about telecommunications again for a second...

I fail to understand how people think that war-dialing my work and cellphone numbers think that it's going to encourage me to talk with them, or put me in any better a mood. Leaving a voicemail and waiting for it to be returned isn't good enough for them, apparently. They war- dial your work and cell numbers for a couple of minutes (every 10 seconds or so), then finally work out that *gasp* they can leave voicemail! So they leave voicemail. Most sane people stop at this point, and wait for their call to be returned. However, they're not sane (or polite), so they continue war-dialing, alternating between numbers.

Eventually I just pulled my work phone out of the PBX jack, and powered down my cellphone. I'm half tempted to leave them both this way.

If there are any Nokia engineers out there reading this, why can't you guys build a simple call blocking feature into the firmware of your phones?!

It doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to do... (some pseudo-code to illustrate my point)..

#!/usr/bin/python
 
display_call = 1
ring_style = 'ring'
cidbank = {}

cidbank[goodperson] = {} cidbank[goodperson][number] = 4159240024 cidbank[goodperson][block_call] = 0

cidbank[badperson] = {} cidbank[badperson][number] = 9095551234 cidbank[badperson][block_call] = 1

def process_call(name):

# If they're blocked, don't do anything... # go back to the event handler.

if cidbank[name][block_call] == 1: return

# If we don't know the number, or it's in the db # (and not blocked), ring the phone..

else: ring_phone(display_call, ring_style)



That's all my ranting for the day. Thanks for listening.

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