Good for you - you are in a painfully small minority. On behalf of non-smartphone people everywhere, I thank youj! {BOW HERE}
Ditto for you - you're in a small minority. Its usually PING, PING, bzzzt bzzt bzzt, PING PING PING.
I was in a jewelry store yesterday. There were 6 customers. 4 of them had their nose buried in their PHOOOOOONNE. People just can NOT put those damn things down.
I hear ya. I've stopped giving my phone number out to most. The doc and the dentist need it, ordering something online does not. I put 000-000-0000 when I can, if not, I put 321-555-1212. I generally do not answer unknown calls, unless I'm expecting a call from an unknown number - then I answer in Greek. If I don't like what I hear, I either hang up, or I keep talking Greek.
I'll return the call if its someone I know, otherwise, nope. Although I hate voicemail, its there if its someone unknown and they actually have to get ahold of me. I do state in my VM greeting that "If you have my email, you're probably better off emailing me." - as I'll probably get the email a lot sooner, days go by when I don't even see my phone, much less check it.
I used to be able to turn texting off - which was very nice. I could turn it on when I needed it, otherwise I kept it off as its a miserable way to communicate if you're not a 16 year old girl. But now, I can't turn the damn thing off when I want to. The checkbox is still there on Consumer Cellular's website, but it doesn't work - pointing this out to them has gotten zero results.
I'm actually thinking of getting an LTE MODEM for my computer, and using that for texting. Then it would be indistinguishable from email, and it would no longer be the nuisance that it is now. I could run it through my procmail filters and SPAM traps, send MMS directly to /dev/null, and life would be good!
