I barely hand out my details to anyone but over the last few months i have been receiving a lot of phone calls on my landline at home. My French isn't great so it really wastes my time as i muddle through the conversation with a dictionary trying to understand what the caller wants and whether they are important. And most times it transpires they are trying to sell me something i just don't want. In the run up to Christmas one company telephoned 17 times in two hours.

Is there a way i can opt out of Cold Calling? In Britain you can sign up to a website to have your details removed from these databases. Does something similar exist in Switzerland? Thanks.

How about an answering machine and picking up only when you know who it is / what it is about ?
Would save your time.

You can ask to be removed from any cold calling, complete this form,

http://info.local.ch/about-us/contact

I am very rude to cold callers; learn some bad French words, and shout them. It works.

Oh brill, thanks v. much! At the moment i am pretending to be the Nanny to get rid of them but that doesn't always work when your toddler is hanging off your leg shouting "mummy mummy mummy".

I heard a good one, just tell the toddler it's santa claus on the line, then hand the phone to the toddler.

That's exactly what I do. Unknown number? Leave a message when it's important.

You don't have to pretend anything, you don't have to be polite. They called you out of the blue. They're the ones being rude, wasting your time, disturbing your evening. Do not feel guilty about being unpleasant to them.

I get these calls despite being registered for not wanting them.

Right up to the point you find out your landlord is pissed at you for shouting - rudely - at his wife.

I think the OP knows this. They said they didn't like the time wasting involved with listening for a few minutes to understand whether it was a cold caller or a genuine call.

I have the same problem. My German isn't good enough to 'instantly' understand who the caller is.

I'm telling you I was sick in bed once, sleeping and a commercial caller woke me up and I hung up on her, would you believe, she called me back and yelled at me, saying "How dare you hang up on me? Maybe you do that where you come from but not in Switzerland"

Try the Seinfeld way:

What a nerve!

What did you do?

If anybody starts doing that to me I just get tough. I ask them for their name, phone number, date of birth, place of birth and such details and tell them I won't speak to them unless I know these things. I tell them in a very polite and friendly way that it is standard procedure and that I am acting on police advice. I also ask if they don't mind me recording the converstaion, and remind them that anything they say can be used against them in court. Normally they give up long before that.

As I said, I was really sick and my brain was temporarily out of order, so I just hung up again, but she didn't call a third time; had I been in my right mind I wouldn't have picked the phone up when it rang again.

At least she did something right... Was she thinking you would be begging to buy stuff from her after she was shouting at you?

Some people are just....

I find that simply asking them whether they speak english puts them off pretty quickly - a genuine caller will genuinely try to communicate (I've even had the electricity lady tell me that she will find someone who speaks english and then call me back within 20 minutes, and they did!).

The genuine callers are more than willing to make the effort to communicate across the language barrier - telemarketers give up straight away - it's very hard to 'pressure sell' in broken english

If you are with Swisscom and these problem calls are from "Witheld" numbers i.e. no caller ID you can block them by doing the following.

Pick up the receiver.
Press the * key.
Enter the number 99.
Press the # key.
Wait for the activation confirmation.

See link for further details

http://www.swisscom.ch/en/res/hilfe/...ervice-99.html

The Local.ch service as mentioned earlier also works.

The trouble with that is it also blocks calls from some numbers from abroad (for example, my parent's number in the UK is withheld) and also from most Swiss banks. I've had to undo the blocking.
For most cold callers I'll just babble in some made-up foreign language

I work on the basis if the Call is not in English I am not interested end of story.

How can i stop the Cold Calling?

By letting Cold play for you.

(c o u l d . n o t . r e s i s t.)