Darkoshi

The masked phone number part of this sounds useful for sites like Google that nowadays require a phone number for setting up an account.

https://relay.firefox.com/

Protect your identity with secure phone and email masking

Our secure, easy-to-use email and phone masks help keep your identity private so you can sign up for new accounts anonymously, stop spam texts and junk calls, and get only the emails you want in your inbox.
...
Limited-time only: ⁨Relay Premium⁩ + ⁨Mozilla VPN⁩ for ⁨$6.99⁩/month

⁨Mozilla VPN⁩ protects you from tracking & surveillance while you’re gaming, online banking, or getting work done. Add it to ⁨Firefox Relay⁩ for ⁨40%⁩ off.

Your 1-year plan includes:
Email masking
Phone masking
Mozilla VPN
...
Use ⁨Relay⁩ email masks and phone masks everywhere

Get secure, random email masks and a unique, masked phone number to use any time a website, app, store, or restaurant asks for your information.

...
We’ll forward emails, phone calls, and texts to you

Rest assured, senders will never know your real email address or real number. You can even reply to texts and emails without sharing your real identity.

Ah, but based on the wording on that page, it sounds like you only get a single masked phone number to use. So you couldn't generate multiple ones for different sites. Unless you pay for multiple instances of the service, I suppose.

But still, I've been thinking about signing up for a VPN service, and getting a masked phone number along with it would be useful, maybe.

I wonder about the "stop junk calls" part though. It seems that whenever you get a new phone number, you're bound to get junk calls trying to reach previous people who had that phone number. Add to that any new junk calls caused by you giving websites that number. Presumably all those calls get forwarded to your real phone. So I don't see how it would reduce junk calls. Are you able to discard one masked number and get another at will? If so, how often?

I would need to look into the details of this some more.

dial a number
misdialed a number
speed dial
pick up the phone
hang up the phone
leave (take) the phone off the hook
unplug the phone
answering machine
hogging the line
party line

[to be continued]

I admit, some of these terms aren't totally anachronisms yet, for people who still have landline phones. But the "dial" ones definitely are, as only antique or retro phones have dials on them nowadays.

Most of the minutes I've used on my new cell phone since I've gotten it have been listening to voice-mails left for (apparently) whomever had this phone number before me. And calling those numbers back to say that said person is no longer at this number, and that they should stop calling it.

Debt and bill collectors, mostly. Actually, I've only gotten calls from 4 companies like that on my cell phone. And only 2 of those have continued to leave messages after they said they would stop.

A different company, actually, has been leaving messages on my house phone since last year, trying to reach a different person. And *they* claim to not even have my phone number in their system. But it all sort of jumbles together and adds to the irritation.

Is it reasonable to be insanely annoyed, when the same numbers continue leaving messages on my phone, trying to reach someone who I don't even know, after they had verbally told me that they would no longer do so?

Eh?????!!!!!

Recently, I was so annoyed at one of those companies that I filed a complaint against them.


Sample message that annoyed me today (these people had also told me that they wouldn't call my number anymore. LIARS):
"This is a message for ***. If you are not ***, please hang up or disconnect. If you are ***, please continue to listen to this message. There will now be a 3 second pause in this message. By continuing to listen to this message, you acknowledge that you are ***.
You should not listen to this message where other people can hear it, as it contains personal and private information. There will now be a 3 second pause in this message to let you listen to this message in private.
This call is from Medical Revenue Services. This communication is from a debt collector. This is an attempt to collect a debt and any information provided will be used for that purpose.
Please contact us about an important business matter at 1 866 631 4680."


I am not **** changing my phone number. I like this **** phone number. I can remember it.

The phone box's ground wire goes into the basement, and it was connected with a clamp to one of the hot water pipes. I thought that perhaps that was part of the problem; perhaps the water heater was interfering with having a direct path to ground. So I considered moving the ground wire over to the cold water pipe instead. Then I remembered that after I moved in, I had a plumber install a shut-off valve on the main water pipe coming into the basement. When he did that, he replaced a small section of the original metal water pipe by the new valve with a section of plastic pipe. So it is possible that before then, the water pipes were grounded, but afterwards, they no longer were. So I installed a new ground wire going from the clamp on the hot water pipe out to the grounding rod outside. Maybe I should have just removed the original ground wire from the phone box, and connected the new wire directly to the box instead of to the pipe. I'm not sure.

Now I shall monitor my phone line over the next few days to see if the static is gone. Here's hoping!!

The first 2 days of the trip were a bit rainy/drizzly, but not enough to keep us inside. Overall, the weather in Germany was quite good.

The pay-phones all took coins so we didn't need to buy a phone-card to make calls (a few years ago I recall most of the pay-phones only took cards).

In Munich, we went up the one tower of the Frauenkirche, which has an observation area, giving a good view of the city.

In Berlin, we went up the television tower, which also had a good observation area.

We went and saw various things, and met with a friend and some family. Qiao bought souvenirs to take home as gifts; I bought mostly chocolate.

One vegan restaurant in Berlin had vegan white chocolate bars for sale (Bonvita Reismilch Tafel Weiss); I bought 2. (Yay! Vegan white chocolate!) That made up somewhat for them not having the (as advertised) vegan cheese-spaetzle available on that day.

There are so many flavors of chocolate bars for sale in Germany. Of the non-dairy ones I found, I bought the following flavors:
Ginger
Lime-Ginger
Sour Cherry
Dark Chocolate with Olive Oil
Pepper
Green-tea Mango
Cherry-Tomato Salt

There was an intriguing "Absinthe Truffel" flavored bar, but unfortunately it had dairy in it.

On the plane-trip back, Qiao and me lost each other in the Atlanta Customs area. While waiting in the first line, picking up our luggage, and waiting in the next line, I was disheartened that we stood a good chance of missing our connecting flight since it was already past the time when it would normally be boarding. I hadn't realized until the flight back that we only had an hour and a half in Atlanta... normally one schedules the flights to allow more time to get thru customs.

I had been flagged to go through the extra agricultural search section, and while I was waiting for Qiao to get through the previous checkpoint, the guards kept telling me to go onward to the agricultural area. So I reluctantly walked that way, and when I saw Qiao heading past, I yelled to him twice. He turned his head and I thought he saw me, but apparently he hadn't. When I exited the other end of the agricultural section, he was no longer to be found. I didn't know if he was still waiting for me back near the other side (the guards didn't seem amenable to anyone walking back that way) or if he had gone on ahead. After dithering about for a bit, I eventually went through the last security screening on my own, even more disheartened now.

When I checked the departure screens for our flight, it said "At gate". That meant it hadn't left yet! Maybe Qiao had gone on ahead, and we could still catch the plane! I started rushing toward the terminal and gate, running in some places, asking people to let me by on the escalator, hurrying past people... naturally, the gate was one which was all the way down at the end of the long terminal, huff-puff, puff... When I got there, I was relieved to hear Qiao call my name and to see him there. So we made it onto the flight; Qiao had got there only a few minutes before me and the flight personnel had told him if I didn't make it there in the next minute, the plane would be leaving without us.

Our checked baggage unfortunately didn't make it to our plane on time. It came on the next flight in.

In Berlin, the light-athletics (?) world-championships were going on. In the Berlin airport, we were sitting for a bit next to someone wearing a nice-looking African-style outfit. I decided to be friendly (good for me!) and asked him if he had been there for the championships. He said that yes, he was the president of the delegation from Burkina Faso and that he had attended some meetings, but had to go back now even though the competitions were still going on.

Flying in airplanes, the occasional turbulence scares me. It seems so easy for a part of the wing or some other important part on the exterior of the plane to break off... and falling from such a height... smashing into the ground... seems scary. I don't remember feeling this fear when I flew as a child.

Ok, now, I've had my local phone service active for 5 and a half days, and I'm already getting phone-spam!

Hah. I just stuck my phone's cord in the wall here for the first time, and I have a dial-tone! If I try to dial a number, I get a message saying that I can only call 911. But I didn't even know all this time, that I could call 911 from the regular phone if I needed too; I thought the line would be dead because I haven't established an account yet.