The carrier feature that doesn't exist

Here is the design everyone assumes, including us, right up until we checked it.

Your mother's phone company keeps a list. On it: you, your brother, her doctor, the pharmacy, her church. Calls from those numbers ring her phone like they always have. Everything else — every unknown number — quietly diverts to us first. We answer, work out whether it's a scam, and either end it or pass the call through.

Clean. Obvious. Exactly what a call-screening product should do.

That feature does not exist. No carrier sells it.

What carriers actually sell

AT&T offers something called Selective Call Forwarding. You dial *63, and you give it a list of six to ten numbers. It then forwards only those numbers, and leaves everything else alone. Xfinity's version works the same way.

It's the precise inverse of what call screening needs. Carriers built the feature for "send my boss's calls to my cell while I'm out" — a small list of people you want followed. Nobody built the version for "screen the strangers."

So the obvious design was out on day one. What we did next is the part worth explaining, because it's the reason your mother's phone will keep working even on the days ours doesn't.

The trap in the obvious workaround

There's a blunter option: forward every call to us. Then we genuinely do answer first, every time.

It creates a problem that sounds like a riddle and is actually a wall. Once we've cleared a call — it's her pharmacy, it's fine — we need to hand it to her. So we call her.

Her line forwards everything to us. Our call to her forwards straight back to us.

There are only three ways out, and each one costs something real:

What we built instead

Her phone rings first. If she picks up, she picks up — nothing about her line has changed. If she doesn't answer, the call rolls to us, and that's when we do the work: we check whether we already know the number, tell the caller they're speaking with an assistant and that the call is being recorded, listen, decide, and either end it or ring her back.

The time before it rolls over depends on what kind of line she has:

• Cell phone — about one ring. Carriers let us set the timer to five seconds.
• Cable home phone — about two rings.
• Copper landline — about four rings.

The part we're not going to smooth over

We used to say HearthCare "answers the unknown call before she does." On a cell phone that's effectively true — five seconds is one ring, and almost nobody answers an unfamiliar number in one ring. On a copper landline it isn't. She can get there first.

So we've changed how we describe it, and that sentence is coming off our own site. We'd rather explain the mechanism accurately than defend a tagline.

Here's what we bought with that:

• Her number doesn't change. Her handset doesn't change. Her carrier doesn't change.
• Nothing is installed in her house. Nothing to unplug, break, or support.
• Setup is one code on her phone, and it undoes with another. We won't leave a family's home until they've watched the undo work with their own eyes.
• If HearthCare is down, her phone still rings. There is no outage on our side that stops a call from reaching her.

That last one is the whole argument. A product that protects an older adult by inserting itself between her and her telephone has to be right about what happens when it fails. Ours fails toward her phone works normally — the same place it started.

What we still don't know

We don't yet know how often she'll answer before the rollover, especially on a landline. We're not going to guess: every screened call records whether she got there first, and the first family we work with will tell us. If the number is bad on landlines, that household gets the adapter after all, and we'll write that up too.