One of my pet peeves is when people call you but the call display says "Private Number". I mean, they are calling you, but they don't want anyone to call them. Hypocrisy, isn't it?
Usually, I just ignore the these calls, but this morning, some private number called my home number, and hung up before we could even look to see who called. Then my cell rang with a private number. I ignored it and went back to sleep, they can leave a message. Then it rang again, private caller, and I got kind of irritated by it. So I answered it.
The woman on the line claimed she was calling from the hospital and had some sort of appointment change. I told her that if she is really calling from a hospital, that her caller id should identify her as from the hospital, not "Private Number".
I mean, any yahoo can pretend to be calling from the hospital and reschedule our appointment, esp if its some other patient trying to score our time slot. These things are pretty easily overheard when booking the appointment after all.
Anyways, this person told me that this is how the hospital works, that it should be "Unknown Caller". I think that is terribly unprofessional of the hospital. It should display their hospital main line number if they dont want people calling their extension, right?
Jeez.
Anyways, the appropriate thing to do here is to confirm the appointment myself by calling the hospital and checking if anything has changed.
Never accept what someone tells you over the phone if they call you. Always say you will call their company/organization back to confirm what they are claiming, and source out the company phone number yourself, don't take any phone numbers they offer you.
Here's the classic scam - someone calls you and says they are your bank/credit card company calling to verify a purchase, say $4000 at some website. Since you haven't bought some $4000 item from soandso.onlineshopp.com, you want to know more and get this sorted out. They need your card# and/or PIN number etc to confirm. Once you give them the info, they clean out you account cause you have given them all the keys to access your account, basically.
This is why you can't trust incoming calls telling you to trust them. Always confirm it yourself, independent of the incoming call.
I should just see if I can make my phones not ring on private number calls.
Allen.
2 comments:
Sounds a bit familiar. Just recently I got a phone call from a debt collector. Basically Companies like Sears, The Brick, Paypal or whoever sell stuff on credit. Sometimes they have a dead beat who doesn't pay. They sell (I guess that's the term) to these debt collectors.
The thing is, the companies don't give them a lot to go on sometimes. Apparently someone with a similar name to me was in debt. The collectors were phoning every one up with a similar name hoping to get the right guy. These people are rather impolite about it and they wonder why they have such a shitty rep with the BBB. Typically they don't even bother saying their company name (the debt collector name) because then the person in debt would probably ignore them. Probably rightfully so.
Thing is, I'm innocent but I have to prove I'm innocent. Which really bites me.
i agree about the scams...scary stuff. one of the reasons hospitals show up as a private number is probably because of patient confidentiality - not everyone at home wants other roomates/family members to see where they're getting their calls from, espcially if it's about a health issue. it was like that at CAMH. it doesn't exactly solve the privacy issue, because we'd have to leave a contact number (and if you dial it, you find out the name of the clinic, but i guess you'd have to be curious enough to dial it back)
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