I'm personally rather sensitive to unsolicited phone calls because they are both interruptive and unexpected. There are only a few windows in my day when I would be interested in talking to someone on the phone, and if I need to communicate with someone outside of those windows of availability I generally need to take some special actions to make myself available.

I have made it a point to put myself on the national Do Not Call registry, so I know that any phone calls I would receive during the day are generally important enough to justify the interruption and I will try to answer rather than let it go to voicemail.

You know that junk mail you'll get sometimes that has no sender information, but is made to look in some way important or personal? Maybe it looks like a bill, or it's in a greeting card envelope. So you have to open it up to find out what's in there, and lo and behold it's an offer for 50% off six months of DirecTV and three months of free HBO to boot. Maybe it's just me, but that's the sort of thing that drives me crazy, and I look at those sorts of phone calls the same way.

Every once in awhile you call someone and they have exactly your attitude. So you politely get off the phone and move on. That's all there is to it.

FWIW, the opt-out process for junk mail seems to be reasonably effective. Since adding my name to DMAChoice I receive very little junk mail (spam drives me crazy too).

This FTC page has a list of places to go to opt-out:

http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolicit...

So then just don't answer the phone.

Why is this being downvoted? If it's important that you not be interrupted by the phone, there are a variety of easy ways to make the phone not interrupt you.

- Unplug it/turn it off - set to silent and turn off vibrate - "Do Not Disturb" setting - "Send all calls to voicemail" - etc.

Because phone calls are already very high up on the "This could be important." scale. Email is usually low priority, to be answered when there is a free moment. Next comes texting and IMing, to be used for organizing day-to-day things, such as where people are meeting for lunch. Above that is people stopping by in person to ask a question.

The highest priority is receiving a phone call, because it means that someone wants to talk to me in particular, can't find me, and can't wait for an email response. Because all the other methods of communication have been bypassed, it must be rather important, and so I will answer it. If it is not important, I will then be annoyed.

If you use the phone in that way, you obviously restrict who you give the number to, because most of the world does not use the phone in this way - many people use it because they find it easier than tapping out an email and organising their thoughts, and many companies use it as a way to contact you for trivial queries. I have lots of clients who would rather just pick up a phone and call, not because it is urgent, but because it is easier for them. If I'm busy that just goes to voicemail and I'll deal with it later, because I can't control how other people use the phone.

I actually have a reverse order of priority in communication, which is interesting. It'd probably be texts (seen immediately), emails (seen quickly, acted on if urgent), then phone calls as low priority (may or may not answer). This is because I dislike interruptions and many people have my number, and most of my contacts don't consider phone calls urgent only.

Since for you it's a high priority interrrupt, you wouldn't be entering the number into website forms, and would not be called. You can easily fill in nothing or junk if a phone number is requested and you reserve the phone for high priority contact.

Because he's replying to someone that explained, explicitly, why he answers the phone even when he doesn't want to be interrupted.

I'll expand on my previous comment to make this more clear: the grandparent's approach is terribly flawed because the Do Not Call registry only covers a narrow range of annoying phone calls.

Calls that are not covered by the Do Not Call registry include:

- Any survey by telephone (even if they are being conducted by a for-profit company)

- Any charity

- Any political campaign, candidate, or committee

- Any company with whom you have had contact in the last 3 months, or done business within the last 18 months

In short, saying let's always answer phone calls because of the Do Not Call registry is like saying let's open every email because of the CAN-SPAM Act.

The only way to reliably manage telephone interruptions is on the client side, i.e. the phone itself. When I don't want to be interrupted I send all calls on the landline to voicemail, and put my cell phone on vibrate--only picking up numbers I recognize, like family or friends, in case it is an emergency.

Because it's a shocking invasion of privacy.

Words mean things. Nobody in America is shocked to get an unsolicited commercial phone call.

Let's say, "depressingly unshocking", then.