It surprises me what people tolerate in life when they accept it as the ‘norm’ – no matter how upsetting and stressful a situation is. So far I’ve only moved house a few times in my life and when I have moved to an area where the new places’ telephone number is on a different exchange to the old one, I’m forced to take a new number.
Now when the telephone provider says ‘new’, what they mean is this – “we’re going to give you another number that was discontinued around 6 months ago with an existing customer, so you’ll be getting calls from people you’ve never heard of as soon as you move in – and that includes those annoying cold calls!”
I’m sure some of you have experienced this and nodding your head right now and you may have already signed up with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) – which is designed to opt you out from receiving these cold calls; but unfortunately this service simply doesn’t work.
The government has announced new plans to make it easier for them to impose fines on companies behind the cold calling. They also offer guidelines on how to deal with these calls such as to:
‘ask the caller to remove your information from their records’,
‘to find out the caller’s number by dialling 1471 after the call’
‘check with your phone company if you can be made ex-directory’.
To me this kind of advice is laughable and a complete waste of time. Why waste your energy on something you really have no control over?
This is where trueCall comes in. It truly is a magical piece of kit that I’ve used at home for years. It allows you to build up a friends and family list (known as a ‘star’ list) which means their calls will always come through to your handset and a ‘zap’ list contains numbers that’ll just get cut off. These lists can be easily managed through your online trueCall account. Any new calls you make that are not on your ‘star’ list will automatically be added so any calls received from that number won’t be blocked. It’s a small box that slots between your handset and the wall socket and comes built in as standard on some new handsets.
It literally stops ALL nuisance calls getting through, so rather than put up with it and cause havoc with your stress levels, take control with trueCall. You can hear more on how it works by clicking on the trueCall box below.
