I’m guessing she has a land line, with no easy way to block calls. So have I, and it is a persistent, annoying problem. It disturbs my peace, breaks my train of thought, intrudes on my attention, and makes me feel like a victim. I often get a dozen or more such calls in a day. Here’s a pertinent article that I read yesterday. The problem is that trying to block those calls is like playing Whack-a-Mole: they pop up faster than you can bash them down. I stubbornly keep the land line (a) because I still want people to be able to reach the household and not just an individual and (b) because I don’t feel like being forced to commit to a technology that follows me everywhere I go. If I can’t answer the house phone, chances are I’m someplace where I don’t want to take a call—driving, for example, or grocery shopping or waiting to pick up a prescription. In none of those situations do I want to be receiving a personal phone call unless it’s an emergency. Call me on my land line and I’ll answer when I’m there or get your message when I get home. It’s getting harder for me to jump and run when the phone rings, and so much more vexing when it’s an empty line, or a little bloop sound and then a voice from half a world away warning me that my Google account has been compromised. If anyone has a good answer to this, I’d like to know it too. Making matters worse is the fact that some legitimate calls come the same way (the bot confirming a medical appointment, for instance), and the people who program them do not make sure that the voice recording starts with a clear statement of who is calling and why. I do have a cellphone, but I keep it mostly for family use and rarely give out the number. Even when I do get spam calls and block them, new variants keep coming in. What used to be a tool we paid for to serve us has instead become a harassing nuisance. Why hasn’t someone figured out how to charge the spammers and phone advertisers for their use, as is done in other media, instead of billing me for service on a device that is mostly used by entities that just want to part me from my money?