What? How is he supposed to know what the person is doing before calling them? Can't they just ignore the call if they want? Should we just never call anyone ever just in case they're really busy?
I don't ignore calls from people as they could be important. Someone may need help, or they may need to notify me of something immediately. This is a good use for interruptive voice calls.
However, if someone keeps calling me for very unimportant issues, then I would ignore their calls, and check voice-mail later to confirm if it was important.
I expect to get down-voted for this as it is a bit unfortunate, but if people think they can have my time whenever they want for whatever they want, then I'm not going to have any time left for myself. Plus, if an important call does come through and I'm stuck talking to someone about something unimportant, then it's the important call that is going to be stuck in voice mail.
Or, you know, you can just say something like:
- "I'm in the middle of something right now. I'll call you back."
- "Hey, I can't talk right now. Try again after 3."
- "Hey, I've got a call on the other line that I need to take. Talk to you later!"
I regularly ignore phone calls, and I tell people - if it's an urgent matter and I don't pick up the phone, call me right back. Two calls in a row means "Pick up, this is important."
For Android there is an fantastic FLOSS app called Harass Me that lets you set an amount of calls in a specific timeframe to make the phone turn up the volume and "harass you" to pick up. I have that setup for emergencies while my phone is silent otherwise.
