Over the last few months, I've started to realize that I hate the phone. I hate being called, and I hate having to call out. Calling someone now seems like intensely rude, hateful behavior -- "HEY, WHATEVER YOUR DOING, STOP IT AND PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!!" Whatever I'm doing when they call, that's what I want to do. And if I call actual people, I assume that they have something they'd rather be doing (since they're in the middle of doing it) than talk to me. Having to call some business, and navigate phone trees, and wait for a customer service representative, is just Hell. As you may have guessed, at this point calling me is probably the worst way to get me to do something, like buy your product or contribute to your cause. Frankly, at this point I'd rather you just drop by. At least then you're making more of an effort than you're forcing me to make.
Is it just me, or are we all on the cusp of having our phones yanked out of the house?
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I hate talking on the phone, but like text messaging which is immediate, yet readily ignorable.
Exactly. It's the combination of immediate action on my part combined with the ability of the recipient to (1) only deal with it when he/she wants to and (2) see the important details at a glance that makes email/texting so much superior, better mannered and more civilized than calling.
Agreed. Email is civilized.
Calling someone now seems like intensely rude, hateful behavior -- "HEY, WHATEVER YOUR DOING, STOP IT AND PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!!"
How is that different from talking to someone in person?
Your aversion to the telephone shows nothing more than an early onset of grumpy-old-man syndrome, but the more interesting question is why the youth of the wired generation shun it like the plague too. Remember the days when the family phone was tied up for hours by the household teen? All gone. In fact, the only people who seem to call our house are telemarketers, utility payment reminders and old fogeys who don't know how to text.
Our son (16) spends all day texting, but demonstrably resists any suggestion he call an off-line friend even when there is a good reason like fixing the time and place for a rendez-vous his parents are standing by to drive him to. A friend with a daughter the same age says she has been told in no uncertain terms that phoning someone is considered pushy and intrusive, and that important mother-daughter talks in her household must be prefaced by a few e-mail exchanges to set an appropriate mood of intimacy.
Continuing my lifelong mission to inject a Darwinist angle into every conceivable subject, I am struck by how many debates begin with blithe, unquestioned agreement that "Man is a social animal". A party animal, maybe, but a social animal in the sense that we instinctively gravitate to human contact? It seems to me that we gravitate to as much distance and privacy as our economic and technological circumstances permit.
"Early onset." That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me this month.
... the more interesting question is why the youth of the wired generation shun it like the plague too.
Just because they aren't using the phone doesn't mean they aren't talking on the "phone".
Skype.
Live and learn.
I thought the teenage girl on the great new TV show, Modern Family, who communicates almost exclusively by texting was just a silly invention of the writers, but as usual, art follows form.
'It seems to me that we gravitate to as much distance and privacy as our economic and technological circumstances permit.'
Certainly true of sleeping arrangements among westerners.
And I find myself more and more unwilling to go out and hassle with crowds, even to see and hear things I want to see and hear.
As a reporter, I live by the phone, but I usually, once someone answers, and I identify myself, ask, 'Do you have a moment?'
What I really, really hate (aside from impenetrable phone trees) is call interruption. However, the rise of text messaging (or something) means that I seldom have someone I am on the phone with say, 'Hold on, I have another call.'
That used to happen almost every day.
Harry, call waiting is rude and whenever anyone says to hold on because they have another call*, I invariably hang up. They usually call back and seldom ask me to hold on while they talk to somebody else again.
*Unless it's an emergency.
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