That's a clever social engineering scheme to collect phone numbers.
I never understood why a telephone gets precedence over somebody who made the effort to come to you in person.
Reminds me of the "Boss Key" you had in earlier games (or as a TSR in DOS), that showed some fake spreadsheet instead of your game screen. This is basically its cubicle cousin.
Resume your focus! ...until our partners call you on a hourly bases for the rest of your life. ;)
I was going to jump on this before I realised that (1) I have my phone on DND when I am 'running silent, running deep', and (2) I found out from the comments here that it doesn't work outside the US.
Perhaps to address both issues, there could be a version of this that doesn't actually make a physical call? Perhaps a pairing of an iOS/Android app to a button on the browser which send a standard in app message (free) to the phone associated with the button. The app could then simulate a ring tone, which would be enough to complete the illusion of an incoming call?
Why not just honestly say you're busy? Works for me.
There's quite a few versions of this. I think a cheaper option is an app on your phone that imitates a phone call.
Just yell "I'm wired in!" and get back to it!
The problem of being distracted when coding was greatly reduced for me when we moved to Git from more ancient version control tools. With faster/easier committing and history browsing, I can now make smaller and more logically divided commits, and thus need to keep less context in my head at every single moment.
What an outrageously annoying website. I love it!
I created a version of this in 2006 (I think), called Getmooh.com - Get Me Out Of Here. The idea was to get people out of bad dates with an automated call.
I used the Skype API with VB6 and some natural voice libraries from AT&T. We mostly got used for prank calls with pre-recorded messages we had. Worked OK. But cost us money and I got bored once it was built. We got maybe 60,000 sign ups I think.
Amusing idea. Absolutely no good reason for this to require a Chrome-specific extension, though; this would work in any browser.
This seems great for those situation where telling the person that you are busy, or cannot attend them anymore wont cut it.
Usually a phone call is the only detractor for them to interrupt me. at the end it ended up being just to let me know something like i got this to compile!! which could have been done on slack or lync.
I think this works only for US and Canadian numbers. Which isn't mentioned anywhere on the website.
I made a similar app to this for Pebble at a hackathon in 2015: https://github.com/phoneyscape
We got an offer from Madrona Ventures for it that I never ended up following up on.
Related but with a different focus, Chelsea Handler made an app called "Gotta Go": https://gottago.io/ The process was detailed in one of her Netflix episodes IIRC.
False premise - a phone call should never be allowed to interrupt a real conversation.
This is a blatant advertisement
pretty standard feature on Japanese phones for unemployed people or people who wanna look more busy or important, I guess people in West don't care do much about losing face our impression
Note the fine print in gray (or is it grey) text at the bottom the page
(Any discount code associated with this experience will expire on December 31, 2017.)
"i'm sorry, i'm on a deadline"
I just say: i'm going to get me a coffee (water, restroom) and when i return they're gone.
If you don't have your phone on airplane mode then you do want to be distracted.
Simple but powerful.
Great job.
Needs a time delay function (+5 minutes for example)
That then gives a limited window for a brief discussion.
On the one hand, seems like a funny solution to a real problem. On the other hand, it might be more productive in the long run to just directly tell the coworker to JFGI themselves (or link them to lmgtfy.com)
Is there any protection against using it to spam call someone else's number? (I'd test it myself but I'm outside the U.S.)
Just be honest and say "please don't think I'm being rude, but I really need to get on with this work." You can be assertive without lying or being nasty.