I consider myself to be a very patient person. However, if I constantly have to follow-up on an issue that is not solved, or I'm bugged to death, that's when I tend to lose my cool.

For a couple of months now, I have been receiving a phone call weekly from an 888 phone number to my cell phone. I know that this is probably someone trying to sell me something, so I usually don't pick up and let that company leave a message if it's such a big deal that they call me. I continued to ignore this phone number because I never received any voice mail message after the missed calls. Yesterday, I decided what the hell--I'll pick up and hopefully get this company off my back.

I answer and there's dead silence. I say, "Hello!!!" three times and decide to hang up. Today, just an hour ago, that same number called me AGAIN. This time, I had enough. I typed the phone number into Google and found the site WhoCalled.us. There, I was pointed to the page with that phone number and a list of 50 complaints!! All of these people had the same experience as me. They'd received the call weekly and no one was there on the other line. What's interesting is that many found the number to be coming from Sprint, which is my cell phone carrier.

A light when on in my head. Since there is no way to block an incoming call on my phone, I decided to call up Sprint and ask them if there was indeed some sort of feature like that. I spoke with a really nice woman who told me that Sprint does not let you block incoming calls. I then told her that from what I gathered on a Web site, that this 888 number was indeed coming from Sprint. I gave her the number and she gladly looked it up for me in the company's records. Sure enough, it belonged to Sprint's automated messaging system that calls customers for special offers!!

Surprisingly, she offered to block Sprint from calling me in regards to promotional offers. I was most grateful to get my quiet cell phone back to normal (I don't get many calls)! Besides, if I wanted a special offer, I'd look into it myself. I never understood why companies feel the need to waste our minutes. I receive special automated offers almost every month from Cablevision on my cell phone, and it's really rather annoying. I was fooled once to pick up; now I just let it go to voice mail.

Ah, the beauty of voice mail. At least that's not going to bug me if I don't have any messages!

So, if you ever have trouble with a phone number, check out WhoCalled to file a complaint. I did!