How to Stop Your Phone’s Ringing … Fast

Welcome to Pogue’s Basics: little tips to help you survive in a technological world. Nobody tells us these things when we first start using a new phone, tablet, gadget, email system, or social network. Or if they do, we forget. So here’s your refresher course.

Sooner or later, it happens to everyone: Your phone starts ringing at an inopportune moment. During a movie, for example, or a wedding, or a funeral.

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At that moment, you want to shut the thing up, fast. Don’t be that fumbling idiot who wastes time pulling out your phone, waking it up, and tapping the Decline button on the screen.

Instead, just press any physical button on the side or top. The power button, for example, or one of the volume keys.

Usually, just wrapping your fingers around the phone and squeezing hard does the trick; you’ll hit one of the buttons in the process. And the phone will stop ringing.

Your caller will still hear the phone-ringing sound, but you won’t. And the call will eventually go to voicemail.

Adapted from “Pogue’s Basics,” Flatiron Books. Coming Dec. 9, 2014.

You can email David Pogue here.