About two weeks ago I began receiving calls from “Private No.” on the Nokia phone I’ve been using. At first I thought nothing of it, until these calls began to increase in frequency. It peaked a couple of days ago, when I received 55 such calls in ONE DAY.   I know the fundamental spam-resistance technique: don’t answer it.  Of course, sheer morbid curiosity got the best of me. I had a few words in mind for these mumbling, non-English-speaking nimrods that keep leaving me indecipherable voicemails.  These voicemails sound like people talking in the background as opposed to actually talking to me.

So when I answered the call, the guy said some crap I couldn’t understand and managed to stay with me on the call for all of about 8 seconds before hanging up.  When I’m in a meeting and I get 12 calls in a row, I look like a dweeb. I have to do something to silence my ringtone, so I dump the incoming private calls to voicemail. The other option would be to turn off my phone, but I just can’t afford to do that.  What’s worse, when these morons go into my voicemail, they’re paging me and leaving me voice messages. The SMS page notifications I receive as a result incur SMS usage, which equals $$$ out of my pocket, sucks my phone memory, and creates a REAL nuisance. We’re talking 20 – 30 voicemails and 20 – 30 text messages every day.
Now here’s the real crap of it: AT&T says they “cannot block private calls”, period, end of story. How idiotic is that? Privacy management out to be the hallmark feature of a usage-based system like AT&T’s cell phone service. This is why companies like Iotum, GrandCentral, and TalkPlus are getting so much attention. They allow you to manage *more* of your own privacy than the cell phone companies do.

Problem is, I already use one of these services and I’m still getting Private No. calls, because the spamming caller isn’t dialing my GrandCentral number–they’re dialing my direct cell phone number. I cannot change my cell number because many of my clients use it to get a hold of me. My number is already on the national Do Not Call list (I registered it even though I shouldn’t have to since it’s a cell). Automatic callback to the private number doesn’t work.
It dawned on me that I should be able to turn my private call ringtone to silent with no vibrate, but as it turns out, this phone won’t let me do that either. So I started investigating call-blocking add-ons for the Symbian OS that runs on my phone. Haven’t been able to find anything yet.  Any Symbian lovers out there know of a good solution?