My phone rings and I answer:

“Hello?”

“Who’s this?”

“Err… don’t you know? You’re the one ringing me, that’s how it normally works anyway, a person rings someone they know.”

“I had a missed call from you and I’m phoning back to find out what you want.”

“I’m sorry but I don’t recognise your number and I haven’t called anyone recently, so I guess it wasn’t me.”

“*adamant* No, my phone shows that I had a missed call from you this morning.”

“Well I haven’t used my phone since yesterday evening, there’s nothing in my call list to suggest I’ve rang you and I can assure you it wasn’t me.”

“But my phone shows a missed a call from you!”

“Well, if it was that important then I’m sure I’ll ring you back and until such time I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree *hang up*”

Apart from being a very annoying call it served to give birth to my theory that mobile phone companies send customers spurious missed calls. Well it makes sense doesn’t it? They’re a bit low on profit this month so they send a couple of thousand missed calls to customers and then sit back and profit from all the subsequent calls.

Don’t dismiss this so easily, I have evidence, or rather I did have until I wiped it. Twice I’ve been called by a relative (my Mum and my step-Mum respectively), they’ve apologised for not returning my call earlier as they’ve been busy and I’ve replied “But I didn’t call you.” On both these occasions I’ve told them to check their call list and give me the date and time that they “received” a missed call from me. Then I’ve checked my own phone’s call history and there’s been absolutely no calls made from my phone at that time to anyone, let alone to them. Indisputable, I rest my case!

And before anyone says it, it’s not the old pocket-calling phenomenon that’s causing this, i.e. you forget to lock your phone and some loose change in your pocket decides to call someone and leave a four minute pocket-shuffling sound on their voice mail.

It might not happen very often but these mobile phone shenanigans need investigating and being a pro-active crackpot, rather than a purely speculative one, I’m trying to persuade Which Magazine to look into this phenomenon for some official recognition.

I was given the following reply from the editor “I will admit this isn’t something which has been brought to my attention before, only silent calls so this is a new one on me. In this instance I have placed a suggestion for you that we possibly look at this in the future when conducting Mobile Phone reports.”

In days gone by if you missed a call there were no means of finding out who had called, other than waiting for them to ring back. And in some ways I miss those days, it was beyond your ability to find out who’d rang and so people tended to just live with it. Contrast this with today’s practices, I feel that a person who returns a missed call to a stranger who didn’t leave a message, is either a bit obsessive or lonely. I mean, it’s okay if you’re coming into the house laden with heavy shopping and you hear the phone just ring off, you immediately pick up the phone and return the call (in the UK you quickly dial 15713 for call last caller). The logic being, the caller is likely still in close proximity to the phone. But what I take exception to is someone who’s been out for the day, weekend, or even longer and sees a number they don’t recognise has called and they excitedly exclaim “Oo, someone called me, I wonder what they wanted *hits redial*?”

There could be an office full of people on the other end of the phone, are you expecting them to conduct a survey of the building to find everyone that’s rang someone in the past week and didn’t get an answer? It kind of makes me scared to misdial when phoning someone because three hours later they’ll be phoning you back wanting to know everything about you “I’m Jane, you rang me, who are you?” “I’m some guy who meant to press the 6 key but missed and hit the 3 instead - leave me alone!” The golden rule that should be implemented is “If it’s important they’ll phone back”, there’s no need to pre-empt this, let sleeping dogs lie (but not in the house, outside).

The next level up of annoyance would be cold-callers (who inexplicably seem to know when I’m on night shift). I used to think that there were only two solutions to cold calls:

1) Keep a whistle near the handset for a couple or sharp toots in reply to someone asking if I’ve considered a patio for my first and second floor home;
2) The old “Can you just hold the line while I switch off the cooker?” followed by a lengthy sit on the sofa to the distant echo of “hello?”

But these don’t tend to stop cold-calls. A friend who worked in a call centre explained that when they find a person that gets particularly “shirty” on the line they tend to slip his number onto a colleague’s call list for the next day as a source of amusement.

But I was happy when someone pointed out the Telephone Preference Service (Sorry it’s for UK residents only, although I found a similar US version here ). You register your phone number as one that doesn’t want to be sales pitched to. Companies involved in telesales are obliged to check this list of numbers before they cold-call and they can be fined for ringing someone on the list. It can be a very short conversation if, despite this, they still phone and you politely ask if they’ve ever heard of TPS? *clunk, dial tone*.

There’s also the Mail Preference Service for junk mail through the letterbox. It will, in shā’ Allāh, reduce junk mail to any surnames that you register. However it does takes a while to kick in and it won’t stop mail addressed “To the Occupier”, unless you change your name by deed-poll to Mr. Occupier.

Short term mental relief can be obtained by filling the numerous free post envelopes that come with ribā based loan offers (which a person bizarrely seems to qualify for purely by merit of being able to open mail) with as many pizza shop flyers, mini-cab call cards, or “work from home” adverts as you can muster and then sticking them in the post. I haven’t figured out how to get revenge on the various pizza shops in my locality though.

Rather than being a completely accurate description, “free post”, actually means that the receiver has agreed to pay the postage, the freeness is therefore restricted to the sender. An emailing list I used to receive once indirectly suggested that people wrap and send bricks through the mail to Land Rover in protest over their supply of Land Rover Defenders to Israel.

In terms of physical people who knock at your door then it’s a difficult one to overcome, so I’m open for suggestions. You can drop hints, such as these door mats I found on Wackymats.com.

Then there’s my personal favourite:

Not that they’ll work but it’d be satisfying answering your intercom system and telling a salesman that the answer is under his feet.

I think the best solution is to just psyche yourself up before you open your front door and as soon as you realise it’s a sales pitch inform them:

“Leave your name and home address with me and if I ever feel like buying whatever it is that you’re selling, I’ll come around, knock on your door and ask for it.”