On my adverts I have been putting my home number till somone pointed out a few pitfalls with this idea- prank calls, lack of privacy, cold calling for selling... I hate mobiles because I dont want to get brain cancer and I dont want to be chained to it! I have relented though and have one which I am going to start giving out although it will cost me a fortune to pick up the messages.

Do you give out for home number or mobile when Advertising (say in local paper/internet)?

what about students?

Thanks

I don't give out my mobile number easily. My home number has been on my information for a number of years. But for the purposes of local phone directories it is ex-directory, so it's not so easily available to Joe Double-Glazing and his ilk. You get the odd call from a computer generated number but these are not so many.

I don't seem to get prank calls: I was initially a bit cautious about putting a number on the internet but most calls from this source seem to be genuine.

Has anyone found that the scam 'my son is coming to your country and I don't want him to be less busy etc etc ' type of e-mail has filtered through into phone calls?

Thanks Maggiemay.

I think what also plays on my mind is that im not the only one who uses the phone- and the dreaded student (or parent) who decides to phone at 7:30am sat morning, or right in the middle of the 'who done it' film!! (Not that they are as important in the long run)!! Prank calls are the worry.

I hate those computer cold calls. Telephone preference service seemed to sort them out at my last house. They used to phone at 7:30 sunday morning. They were doubly unpopular in our house!

I was worried too about publishing my home number, particularly since I've worked in a local comprehensive and thought I could be an easy target. So far, no trouble, and the latest anyone has rung has been 8-9pm in the evening. If you are really worried, having caller ID can be reassuring. Make sure you have voicemail or equivalent so if you are teaching you can ignore it until ready. This is also useful if the prank calls do materialise, because you don't have to run to the phone just in case it is a potential pupil. Also don't forget, land phones have switches to turn off the ring as well, just remember to switch it on again in the morning! But again we haven't even had to do that.

Maggie - no one has tried to scam me over the phone re my son/daughter is coming to your country etc, possibly because they know they would be easily tripped up over the phone and fairly quickly. Unless some poor unfortunate soul has had an expert con them. We are all smart about that until really taken in.

Hi dcmbarton,

I dont think im earning enough to have a seperate landline yet. I think the attraction with a pay as you go mobile is the 'off' button for use in lessons or out of hours, but I dont want to be chained to a voicemail service.

I understnad the seperation from home and work- at the moment if someone else picks the landline they will just say 'I'm in' and come and get me! (I could never be a doctor on call!)

I'm just very aware that once your information is in the public domain then you cant retract it.


I think I am going to start giving out a mobile number (with an answer message from me) and then if i have to call back then use the landline (with no caller info). I guess I can get a 'no brain cancer' hands free?

Would it put people off only giving out a mobile number, and not a local landline number?

Thanks JaneS, you replied while I was typing!

I dont want to loose business, but I want to be able to relax at the right time too! Turning the phone ringer off would not go down well with the other members of the family!!


It is strange, pre mobiles this would not have been a thought at all.

I only give out my mobile number. The reason for this was originally that I lived somewhere with no landline. However now it means I can turn the phone off if I don't want to be contacted or indeed screen calls.

Like David I don't appreciate people phoning about work at 8am or around 9pm. I have had people calling around 8pm on Saturday evenings when I have been in the pub or on Sundays, which I think is not really on! My rule is not to answer unrecognised numbers after my self-imposed business hours. If I spot it is a pupil calling and think it might be important I will answer it if it suits. Otherwise they can leave a message and I can get back to them at a more suitable time, usually the next day.

The other plus-side to the mobile is that I have lived in five different places since I started teaching eight or nine years ago and will be moving again sometime in the next year or so. Everyone has my mobile number and therefore I haven't needed to run around updating their information or losing business because I have changed my number.

The jury seems to be out on the whole mobile phone/cancer link so to be honest I think you're being a little paranoid! I doubt you would stay on the phone for long enough to have any ill-effects and you might find that you often communicate with existing pupils via text. I do!

I bought a pay as you go mobile just for work purposes as I wanted to keep my worklife separate and I can decide if I want to answer my phone now. It's also quite handy if I need to change lessons or just give a quick message by text and parents find this easier as they can reply when they want. Working out and monitering how much calls cost is also easier for tax. I had to stop using home phone for work as I'm at home with the parents and it was starting to annoy them as it was CONSTANTLY ringing at all sorts of times!

I encourage people to contact me on my mobile rather than my landline. First of all, if I'm teaching I don't answer the phone and my own kids don't always pass on messages. Fine if nobody answers, because then they'll leave a message, but if the phone is actually answered I may never get to hear that it was for me!

Text messages are very handy as well. I agree with David that it's not really acceptable to ring too early or too late, but a quick text is different, and a mobile can be on silent if the time has passed by which I'm happy to communicate. (And the same for the other party.) But the message is there and can't be missed. Older pupils communicate with me by text, as well as parents, with all sorts of queries, and it's a good way to remind them of things that I don't want them to forget! Even things like, "Don't forget you promised x you'd lend him that book tonight." Or from pupil - "Sorry, I might be ten minutes late, so you've time to put the kettle on."

I've never had anyone abuse the fact that they have my mobile number, and have never had any scam.

People thought smoking was safe for centuries and look where that got them!!! Plus the general public have only been using mobiles for 10-15 years. No-one knows how 30, 40 or 50 years of use will affect the body as only a few people have had the device for over 15 years. If you think about the amount of radiation the body absorbs from wireless interent, powerlines, mobiles- it cant be good!! I have come to this assumption based scientific research that I was personally involved with working on and I know a lot of scientist who feel the same, so my paranoia is scientific theory based- I'm not a headless chicken jumping on a bandwagon honest!!! I have specific concerns.


That said I do think text is a good communication, and I think a hands free set will help for any calls I have. (Still dubious about blue tooth technology).



Anyway, thanks for all the replies. It is good to know that I am not the only one who is worried about phone number abuse! Keep the advice coming!

I tend to give out my landline as I object to paying a mobile phone company in order to pick up messages and I don't want to take out a contract. I've never had any problems so far, apart from the odd person calling at anti-social hours which presumably they would have done anyway if they'd had my mobile number.

I give out my mobile number as I teach at a studio and I am rarely at home except in the evenings, so no one would ever be able to get hold of me!

Also, I have moved flats quite a lot recently and until this month, I didn't have a landline at all. Now that I have one, when I get a phone I won'y be giving the number out to students and parents - i will be my private line.

As has been said - you can put a cell phone out of the way and on silent when you don't want to hear from people, but you will still get the message when you want. It is easier to control who you communicate with and when on a cell than it is on a landline.

Im not sure what you mean about being tied to a vaicemail service - most phone companies now offer free voicemail and just just have to press a button to receive the message that has been left for you. The last time I remember thinking about the cost of retrieving voicemails was in about 2005.

Tied to a voicemail- if anyone knows of a pay as you go service which wont charge me to pick up messages then please type it here. I won't go on contract so it is PAYG or nothing. I have yet to find a service that will let me listen to messages for free, text a bit, pick up the odd call, make emergency calls.

The only one I have found with 'free' voicemail is a service that you have to top up £10-20 each month.

Me too, although I am not in the UK. I have a pay-as-you-go account and it costs me the princely sum of €20 every six weeks or so, depending on how often I use it. I also get 300 free webtexts a month and if I am at home I text everyone from that.

Music Song, I respect that you are obviously a scientist, I was simply going on information I have gleaned from the web etc.

if you don't want a mobile, have you considered Internet telephony (VoIP)? i assume you already have an internet connection at home, so there's no connection fee (unlike a second BT line, which would set you back around £160, i believe), and you can easily add more "lines", so the same phone has multiple incoming numbers, making it easy to see if it's a "home" or "work" call. you could even divert your work number to voicemail out of hours. plus, call costs tend to be either the same or cheaper--especially for international calls, which are usually much cheaper.

a search for 'uk voip' should turn up quite a few providers--i've had recommendations for Gradwell, AAISP and voiptalk, all of which seem reasonable.

Pianodub- no worries (wouldnt say scientist exactly but I am (and probably always will be) sceptical about mobile phones). Thanks for the advice though.



Does calling and having an aswerphone put you off leaving a message?


Thanks for the info about VoIP, I'll look it up! It is good to know what the options are before making an informed descision.

I find a landline with caller display and an answerphone works marvels. If I'm busy, the answerphone takes it. If I don't want to be bothered, the answerphone takes it. If I'm not sure whether or not I want to be bothered, I'll check the caller display first in order to see who it is.

Personally, I've never used a landline number for teaching. Mobile is best. Firstly, I'm rarely at home when anyone calls and secondly, it doesn't matter if I was to suddenly up-sticks and move or even go abroad.

There is no evidence that mobile phones will give you brain tumours, or microwave it. Yes, mobile phones use microwaves, but at such a miniscule level of wattage power you'd never cook one baked bean with a mobile phone, let alone your brain. I've been using mobile phones extensively for the last 13 years and my brain is the only bit of me that still functions the same now as it did back in 1996! In fact, it's the rest of my body that's packing up instead - and not mobile phone related either. To help alay your fears (and anyone elses who's worried about mobile phones) I will direct you to Here where you will find links to rational information, as opposed to mass-media scaremongering.

Pay-as-you-go phones are expensive if you intend to make regular use of them. A contract phone is far healthier on the pocket. Start on the lowest contract monthly payment available with your provider and then if you find you are going over your allowance, you can always move up to the next level.

It pays to shop around for contract deals, but T-mobile offer excellent value pay-monthly contracts and you even get a free upgrade on your phone every 12 or 18 months, depending on the contract you've got. My latest phone upgrade is a BlackBerry Curve 8900

It might muck up your teaching a bit, though!

If you don't want a full contract but want to avoid expensive call costs and want to avoid paying for voicemail, why don't you have a look at liberty sims?

O2, Vigin Mobile and Vodaphone all offer 30 day contracts at around £10 per month and you get all the benefits, free calls, free texts and free voicemail of a contract but there is no obligation to a full term contract. If you want to cancel, you just give them 30 days notice. I think its fantastic!

I use the home phone which has an answerphone on almost continuously and the rest of the family know not to erase any calls about lessons (in fact I think I'm the only one to erase any calls at all! ). This is mainly because I'm not a great user of the mobile phone, and I only have it on for emergencies usually. And I'm petrified of losing the wretched thing.

That said, at least 2 singing teachers I know who are in the 20 - 30 year old bracket live by the mobile phone and use it as a diary and keeper of all information, and sonny Jim's trumpet teacher is a mobile phone person too.

I think it might be an age thing, or a technophobe/philia thing.

I think mobile phones are great if you wander as you teach as such! Since I teach from home, the land line is the best bet for me and I keep my mobile for friends and family, with emergency contacts for pupils only (delayed unavoidably).

I mostly have my mobile number on advertising though on VERY local advertising I use my home number.
I don't use voice mail at all and my phone is usually only on between about 9am and 9pm.
It's also switched off when I'm not in a position to answer it or when I'm in a place where it has to be switched off.
My students have my home number.

MusicSong,

There are 3 sources of natural radiation: cosmic which give you on average 28 mrem per year, terrestial (200 mrem per year, total body, a lot higher for the lungs) and internal, 40 mrem per year.

In contrast, human source radiation is very small - xrays generate an average of 14 mrems and consumer products (including mobile phones) 10 mrems.

Other academic sources have slightly different numbers but the order of magnitude is always about the same.

The vast majority of your exposure to radiation has nothing to do with microwaves, mobiles or any other similar product.

Good luck with your phone choice.

I advertise only my landline. I do use my mobile to contact students on their mobiles, so they inevitably get my number. I tell them to always ring me on my landline or send me a text, so that the mobile is kept for family, who know only to ring me in an emergency if I am teaching (and there have been real emergencies, when I was glad I answered the phone). If I am away from the house, I don't want to take business calls - nothing worse than when going through the check out at the supermarket, or I could be on holiday abroad. I don't use the message service on my mobile, so they HAVE to ring my landline.
When teaching I let the answerphone take the call. My family have special ringtones on my landline, so I know straight away if I want to get up from the sofa at 11pm!
I have no choice but to answer the phone at 8.30am or late because my husband also uses this line for his plumbing and heating business, and has been known to be called out for a gas leak. However if he doesn't want the business, we let it go to answerphone. We have number display to vet calls, with friends and others we would want to take the call from stored in the phone's memory, so the display would read, for instance, "MARY".
Our number is also ex-directory and we are members of Telephone Preference Service, so rarely get sales calls now.
In truth, the phone isn't going all day, so it doesn't bother me. When students ask a convenient time to ring, I say after 9pm as some students in the last slot of the day are more like friends, and we can often gossip for 15 minutes after the lesson is over!

Additionally, it is ionising radiation which (in large quantities), can damage healthy tissue. It does this by damaging the DNA within the cells, so that when they replicate they often develop a mutation in their structure. Cell mutations can lead to cancer or deformities. However, ionising radiation used in very specific doses, is used to treat cancer and other malignant tumours. So it's not all bad.

Ionising radiation is at the short wavelength end of the spectrum - even shorter than UV light wavelengths - and includes x-rays and gamma rays. These wavelengths tend to have very high energies, hence why we can use them to see through soft tissue to look at bone and gamma energy to zap tumours. There are other forms of ionising particles - alpha and beta - but I'll refrain from further adorning my bobble hat and anorak

Microwave radiation is at the opposite end - long wavelength - this includes radio and TV signals and mobile phones. This is not ionising radiation because the energies are too low and the wavelengths too long to interact with soft tissue or even bone structure. Therefore it does not damage cell DNA.

Mostly my private landline, although my mobile number is on my business card, so most of my students have it. They usually only use it for texts or emergencies though, it doesn't happen too often actually.

When I advertise, it's usually the landline as well, because some people still feel reluctant to phone a mobile since it is more expensive (I know I know ).
If I don't want to answer the phone (and I normally never answer the phone during tuition), everything goes on the answering machine, I never found this a problem. I usually teach with 15 minute gaps, so I mostly have time for a quick listen if someone tried to phone.

The only downside is that most people know that music teachers tend to work from home, so they seem to think you're permanently "on-call", no matter if it is after 10pm, before 8am or the weekend Nowadays, I let these calls bounce to the answering machine and phone them back later (I have caller display, so I can filter the really important "family and friends" calls).

I don't know why some people seem to think that music teachers are always available, I find this quite impolite actually, but what do you do ...

That's the one really good thing about a mobile and something not all landline phones have - the ability to switch the ringer off, even if you want to leave the phone on. Leave switched to vibrate only, I can keep the phone with me and still filter the calls.

Paranoid - perhaps yes, perhaps no. You might find this interesting: http://www.planningsanity.co.uk/reports/trower.htm

I think there are too many other factors involved in the reason people develop ill health. I don't think illnesses can be attributed to any one thing. Or lives in general are pretty artificial these days - as opposed to how nature intended us to live.

For as long as humans demand an 'easy way of life', technology will always be pushing the boundaries regardless of any long-term implications - be it global warming, carcenogenic issues or general destruction of the environment solely for the purpose of an ever growing human population. We live in an age where gadgets are the driving force behind most things we do and it is (often) the very people who beat their little drum about microwave masts who'd be the first to whinge when they can't get a signal on their mobile phone........

How would those of you with children feel if your child didn't have a mobile phone to contact if they were stuck somewhere and needed help? or worse still, they had a phone but there were no masts in the vicinity because people had forced companies to remove them, hence no signal. In fact, a mobile phone will be using more power to search for a weak signal, than it will if there are plenty of base stations around.

Let's take away cars, TVs, radios, computers, games consoles and similar gadgets, and see how everyone gets on without them. Not very well I suspect.

I give out my mobile number to my students and not my home number. That way i can choose to switch my mobile off if i do not want to be disturbed, then pick up the voicemail messages later. Some mobile companies allow you to call voicemail free of charge so it's not costing you anything to do this. It's much more convenient to me as i don't want my husband being disturbed or having to jot down phone messages etc, and pupils can reach me even if i'm out as i ususally always have my mobile in my bag. I really just don't like the idea of students knowing my home number and phoning me at all hours. Having said that though, i've had to make it clear to my teenage pupils not to send me text messages saying they can't make their lesson. I've found some of them only too eager to do this!!!

[/quote]I think there are too many other factors involved in the reason people develop ill health. I don't think illnesses can be attributed to any one thing. Or lives in general are pretty artificial these days - as opposed to how nature intended us to live.

For as long as humans demand an 'easy way of life', technology will always be pushing the boundaries regardless of any long-term implications - be it global warming, carcenogenic issues or general destruction of the environment solely for the purpose of an ever growing human population. We live in an age where gadgets are the driving force behind most things we do and it is (often) the very people who beat their little drum about microwave masts who'd be the first to whinge when they can't get a signal on their mobile phone........

How would those of you with children feel if your child didn't have a mobile phone to contact if they were stuck somewhere and needed help? or worse still, they had a phone but there were no masts in the vicinity because people had forced companies to remove them, hence no signal. In fact, a mobile phone will be using more power to search for a weak signal, than it will if there are plenty of base stations around.

Let's take away cars, TVs, radios, computers, games consoles and similar gadgets, and see how everyone gets on without them. Not very well I suspect.
[/quote]

Interesting viewpoint. The call for properly-tested technology, however, is not one for the eradication of it.

It depends on how you define properly tested. Drugs for example go through at least three phases of rigorous testing before release, but it doesn't preclude the fact that once it's being used openly there may be someone somewhere who reacts badly to it. Efficacy and safety have to based on the results of a sample population.

At some point new technology also has to be let loose on the public. Where and when is often based on what technology is being used ie. is it based along the lines of similar equipment which is already in safe use.

The ideas of most modern gadgets will have been around for many years before release, sometimes decades before the public even get to see the prototype.

We are a society that demands upgrades, new stuff, improved, faster, smaller or whatever else we demand. This means that testing is often performed in limited time so that we get our 'wants' a lot sooner.

'Properly tested' : long-term, peer-reviewed, independent.

'Rigorous' testing: Thyroxine tablets often contain lactose and maize - quite possibly GM-derived. GM technology has not had long-term peer-reveiwed independent tests. The suppliers of any given batch, on their own admission, do not know whether they contain GM-derived ingredients or not. Over the counter aspirin seems to have a similar story.