When you just miss a call, you try to call them back, but they might be trying again. You get the engaged tone, and subsequently embark upon an irritating game of call my bluff as you try to figure out if the other caller is the kind of person to persist calling (in which case you should stop trying and wait for them) or the kind that gets frustrated by the whole debacle and throws their phone away in a frenzied rage. I always get it wrong, seemingly halting my attempts for the exact same amount of time as my would-be converser does, only to try again precisely as they do. Engaged. Engaged. Engaged.
How hard could it be for the devices to recognise that the phone you are calling is engaged in the act of calling you? How hard could that possibly be? Seriously, how hard? Why don't you just get put through? If a phone can beep when another call is coming in, then there's another bandwidth to carry this synchronisation marvel.-- theleopard, Oct 08 2009 Oh, all the phones do this already. It's just your one that doesn't.-- Ling, Oct 08 2009 Meanwhile, we need a convention, like whoever initiated the call should be the one to reconnect. In the early days of Skype, when average call length before being dropped was just long enough to dispense with honorofics and get to business, I would start every conversation with "If we get disconnected, I'll call you".-- egbert, Oct 08 2009 [21], yes, "engaged" is UKish for "busy".-- theleopard, Oct 08 2009 //like whoever initiated the call should be the one to reconnect// That's the whole problem - you fear they won't because you think they think you're out. So you call them to let them know that you weren't out, just slow to reach the phone. But you were wrong to think that they thought you were out, and thinking you were slow, but not thinking you would eagerly call them, they were already calling you back.-- pocmloc, Oct 08 2009 That's the thing, there are two types of people in this world. Persisters and giver-upperers. Even if we assigned these roles to two halves of the population, there will inescapably come times when two persisters call each other, resulting in the busy signal – forever – , while the giver-upperers will have relationships torn apart as their supposed loved ones fail to call back, the heartless bastards.
If you achieve a partnership with the opposite type, rapture! Joyous telephonic harmony for the rest of your days! But, sorry Jack, it's a cruel world out there, and for every match there's a fail, 10 times over, which inevitably leads to frustration and subsequent jail time.
Something must be done.-- theleopard, Oct 09 2009 I've never really understood pagers. As far as I can tell, they didn't massively take off here, whereas everyone in the US seems to have them, judging from the movies. Aren't they useless in comparison to a mobile phone?-- theleopard, Oct 09 2009 Isn't a pager just like calling someone back, with a guarantee that they'll not answer, and have to call you back?-- pocmloc, Oct 09 2009 Yes, only you have to talk to someone else first - I once had a friend who had a pager - you had to call a call-centre and dictate your message to one of the girls on the phone, who would then type it out and send (what was essentially, a small sms) out to the intended recipient. Now that everyone has sms capable phones, I don't see where pagers fit anymore.-- zen_tom, Oct 09 2009 I thought this was about connecting the call lists on your smartphone, creating a smart call-list.
You would see: [Home] 09:32 Call from [Home] add orange juice to list [remarks] 10:11 Called [Home] done [remarks] 11:15 Missed call [Home] See THIS LINKED sms from Junior [remarks]
[Boss] 09:36 Missed call from [Boss] [remarks] 09:40 Missed call from [Boss] [remarks] 09:43 Missed call from [Boss] [remarks] 10:09 Call from [Boss] end of vacation. [remarks]
Still yours is a great idea.
How do you get the PBX manufacturers to realize this is a feature that millions of users want? Used to be Efrat (later to become Comverse) was the one of the biggest manufacturers. I know some bigshots there... Worth the try.-- pashute, Aug 25 2011 random, halfbakery