Egyptian women harrassed now by phone

Post by **Ebikatsu** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 11:51 am

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8313695.stm

Article and video

I'd like someone to develop a mobile with built in tazer

When these slimebags call you , then you press a key and they get 'tazed'!

Post by **Horus** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 12:55 pm

Probably the same men who insist that their own women are covered from head to foot and must not hold a conversation with anyone outside of their family.

Post by **Glyphdoctor** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 1:33 pm

It's funny they call it a growing problem because the problem used to be much worse before the introduction of the mobile phone though, when everyone had fixed landline numbers that couldn't be changed and there was no way to know the number calling you.

When I first came to Egypt it was always a problem for foreigners renting flats because all of the kids in the neighborhood would know the number of the flat since it always stayed the same and would call and harass the foreign tenants constantly.

When we were first married it was still in the early days of the mobiles but we had caller id on our home line in Cairo, but there was no caller id in Luxor so the people there didn't even know it existed. One time my husband was in Luxor and I was in Cairo and I saw a number from Luxor call but I didn't answer it because I knew no one from Luxor should be calling Cairo as they would have all known he was in Luxor. I called my husband and told him about it and it turned out it was the number of the hotel where one of his friends worked in Luxor. My husband already had plans to meet this guy and some other people for iftar (it was Ramadan) a few hours later and my husband confronted him about it and he claimed he accidentally had dialed the Cairo number when trying to call my husband's mobile, but of course, he hadn't tried dialing my husband's mobile afterward so his story didn't wash. The fact that he had shown up for the iftar with someone else we knew couldn't be trusted also made my husband very suspicious that the two of them had placed the call together. Well, before iftar even started my husband broke his fast by putting his now ex-friend in his place for what he had done and that was the last time anyone even dared to try anything like that with me because my husband made it quite clear he would not tolerate it!

However, some months later we started getting multiple calls in the middle of the night from multiple different numbers that nonetheless started with the same numbers. We would not answer the calls but they kept coming. We investigated it and found out that all the numbers were at al-Ahram newspaper. Obviously someone kept calling via the switchboard using different numbers. We knew no one that worked there so we had no clue what that was ever about.

With mobiles you can see the number and you can block it from even ringing the next time they call so it is much harder to get away with harassment. Someone needs to teach these girls how to use their phones if they don't know how to do that!

Post by **Glyphdoctor** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 1:34 pm

Horus wrote:Probably the same men who insist that their own women are covered from head to foot and must not hold a conversation with anyone outside of their family.

I doubt it. It's most likely unmarried lowlifes.

Post by **Ebikatsu** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 1:49 pm

didn't you think it was your hubby calling from Luxor Glyph since he was there anyway ?

What women need is a whislte and blown that down the phone and burst their ear drums

Post by **Glyphdoctor** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 2:21 pm

No, because it was a number on the East Bank (I knew the West Bank prefixes) and had to be someplace with a mubashir line (which was quite rare outside of businesses), plus we are on the West and we shared one mobile between us at the time and it was with him and so he would have called me from that and I would have seen it was his number and picked up the phone.

Post by **Horus** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 3:53 pm

What a place! and I thought the UK was bad enough with unwanted sales calls, but at least you can block those. But how bad is it when a number displays on your phone and you dare not answer it because you cannot think whom it may be from?

Post by **HEPZIBAH** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 5:17 pm

[face=Comic Sans MS]I am still plagued at work with various 'Public Service', 'You have won...', etc type calls. The weired thing is that most of them come in when I've switched the phone through to our spare line connected to our ansaphone. For some reason 'normal' calls are still picked up by the ansaphone and recorded but these unsolicited calls still ring on my office phone.

[/face]

Post by **FABlux** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 5:29 pm

Ebikatsu wrote:What women need is a whislte and blown that down the phone and burst their ear drums

That worked well on sales calls in the UK too

Post by **Ebikatsu** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 2:31 pm

heh heh heh

Post by **Goddess** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 2:55 pm

Horus wrote:What a place! and I thought the UK was bad enough with unwanted sales calls, but at least you can block those. But how bad is it when a number displays on your phone and you dare not answer it because you cannot think whom it may be from?

Tell me about it Horus!
Thankfully I don't have such a big problem as in years gone by.
When it starts though - it just seems to go on for days and no amount of saying "wrong number" helps.
I remember a few years back when I had about 50 calls in one day and kept saying 'wrong number', until I gave up and switched to English and chatted for half an hour as they passed the phone round the family and I told them all about my dinner.

Better waste their pennies than mine!

Post by **jewel** » Wed Oct 21, 2009 1:16 am

Repressed sex in Egyptian society manifests itself in many forms: crank calls, Arabic porn channels, harassing women in the street, secret marriages
Said Sadek
AUC Sociology Dept

Says it all - from similar article

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle ... 314091.stm