March 10, 2008
How Some Bloggers Feel About Talking on the Phone
Yglesias: “I couldn’t be more thrilled with the phone’s decline. I used to be painfully shy as a person, and while I’ve largely gotten over that IRL I still find it incredibly stressful to talk to people on the phone.”
Atrios: “I think I enjoyed chatting with girls when I was 13 or so, but since then I’ve pretty much hated the phone.”
Alan Jacobs: “This is a loathing I share, and have for a long time.”
McMegan: “Weird fact: every single (successful) blogger I know hates talking on the phone. I’m gregarious face to face, and I’m an inveterate user of various kinds of textual messaging, but I would rather scrub my floors with a toothbrush than get on the phone.”
Kevin Drum doesn’t seem to mind. I, for one, hate really don’t like talking on the phone.
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19 Responses to “How Some Bloggers Feel About Talking on the Phone”
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Me too!
Funny, I love the phone. Although there are only a small subset of people I like to call and talk to. But I have no qualms about making any phone call.
Although I guess I’m a pretty mediocre blogger. So maybe that says something.
Every now and again I will phone one of my longtime friends, and we will jabber for an hour or more. Other than that, I am virtually pathological in my fear of the telephone.
I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate the phone, for both business and personal use, and I did so before I’d ever heard of the Internet.
Even with dear friends whom I love to talk with, I have to force myself to initiate a call, and I cringe whenever my own phone rings. Leaving me a phone message is the surest way to not get a response in a timely fashion. Some of my friends are resigned to this; others, not so much. I know I’m on the shitlist of at least one of my best friends right at this very moment . . .
This aversion also wastes enormous amounts of my already mismanaged time at work, as I’ll often spend half an hour writing an e-mail about something I could have resolved in a five-minute phone call. And there are vendors I have to work with who apparently have the same aversion to e-mail that I have to the phone, so half of my e-mails to them get ignored—the person plays dead until I finally call to say, “Did you get the e-mail I sent you?” This communication incompatibility has created some notable fuckups over the years.
Ugh. Just thinking about it is making me tense.
For those that don’t like using the phone, what is it about the medium that makes you averse to it? Loss of facial expression? Not having the ability to rephrase before something is actually said like you can with email?
I need to point my wife to this. She hates making phone calls.
Over the years I’ve thought about this, Patrick, and I still haven’t come to a satisfactory explanation. If I’d kept a log of all of my phone conversations, it might be revealed that the bulk of them centered on matters that had the potential, at least, to generate confrontation. But I doubt that’s the case.
Jon once put forth a hypothesis that makes a little bit of sense: Because the pauses we fill naturally with facial expressions and gestures when talking face-to-face feel uncomfortable to us when we talk on the phone, we talk more rapidly than usual and so our breathing becomes rapid and shallow. Maybe those of us who dislike the phone are responding to a sense of hyperventilation that we read as ‘anxiety’. In other words, it starts with a mild social discomfort (”gotta fill in this silence”), our behavior produces a physiological phenomenon (rapid, shallow breathing), and we associate the physiological sensation with fear. Result: fear of the telephone.
Or it could just be that we’re weird.
The only thing I hate worse than making a phone call is answering the phone. It’s interesting that so many flockers are phone averse.
In answer to your question, Patrick, some of it is a general preference for solitude over human contact. Some of it–the answering part–is wanting control over my own time. Some of it is, as you suggest, the lack of facial expression and visual cues. But all of this doesn’t add up to my full hatred of telephones. I don’t fully understand my aversion, but I know it runs deep.
One interesting aspect of this is that I have much less difficulty dealing with telephones at work than at home. I prefer emails to phones at work for practical reasons–if it’s important information that’s being shared, I want to have a digital record of it that I can refer to as needed. But I’ll answer my work phone without hesitation, whereas I practically never answer the phone when it rings at home, and I don’t even want to listen to messages on the home phone.
Go figure.
It strikes me that one thing I dislike about the telephone — about incoming calls, that is — is their seeming insistence. “Drop whatever you’re doing or thinking and attend to me now!” Add to that the generally alarming sounds that traditionally signaled a phone call (BR-R-RING! BR-R-RING!), and in my case, you wind up with a deep aversion.
My cell phone’s ringtone replicates a chiming, ticking grandfather clock, and I’ve selected the least offensive tone available on the landline phone I use, but they still bug me.
I echo all of this.
I only have a cell phone, but I am an avid screener of phone calls. I always check the incoming number and if I don’t recognize it, then I won’t answer. You can leave me a voicemail if you want a return call.
I have also known a number of people who dial without thinking about what they are going to discuss or, even worse, dial immediately when something related to me pops in their head. This could mean as many as two or three phones calls from the same person in one day. You can imagine the aggravation.
I suspect that, for me, most of my distaste stems from this.
“I have also known a number of people who dial without thinking about what they are going to discuss or, even worse, dial immediately when something related to me pops in their head. This could mean as many as two or three phones calls from the same person in one day. You can imagine the aggravation.”
uggg!
Yep. Except for the occasional longish call to a couple of long-time friends I don’t see much, I hate the telephone. I hate it when phones ring, even if it’s not one I have to answer.
And here’s another thing. I really, really, really dislike people who love their cell phones. To the point that I don’t need to know another thing about them–if they’re attached to their cell phones, I don’t want to know them.
Cindy, yes! I saw three people walking together in the mall, to of whom were talking on their cell phones. They were sort of drawn out into a weird cluster of people trailing people talking into their hands.
[...] correlation does not imply causation, but I still want to apply fuzzy logic to this post I found on clusterflock. Excerpt [...]
I wish there was some virus that could be used to clandestinely change peoples’ ring tones to heavy breathing porn sounds. That would work very well for tones that start off gradually in a person’s purse or backpack. Cindy wants a tourette’s ring tone because she’s a health care professional. She just gave me a sample of what it would say, but I can’t give it to you here. I could give it to you on a co-worker’s computer, maybe….
I meant to come back a week ago to address Patrick’s question, but I kept getting distracted. More on that below . . .
Honestly, I don’t know why I hate the phone, but it’s entirely of a piece with hating public speaking, raising my hand in class, and going to parties where I don’t know anybody. I love people; I believe that insofar as there’s any point to being alive, interacting with people is it. And I can be horrifyingly talkative when I’m in a situation in which I feel comfortable. But I’m certainly not what you’d call a “people person,” and I tend to be verbal but not oral. I either don’t talk at all, or I talk too much; I don’t believe that I um–uh–like–y’know as much as many people, except ironically (but then again, we never hear ourselves say those things), but I’m not very organized when I speak, either. I ramble. I bore. And I’m aware of it, which only makes it get worse.
It’s also part of a general aversion to doing things at which I suck. I’ve had more than one job where talking on the phone was a large chunk of my work, and as long as I knew what I was talking about, and I knew what needed to be said, I was fine with it. Suave, even. I’ve also worked in offices where everybody shares the receptionist duties, and while I detest that practice, because the person who ends up answering the phone the most is the person who hates the sound of it most passionately—which would be, of course, me—I’m not bad at it. I’ve been told (just yesterday!) that I have a good phone voice, and I’m very capable of sounding professional. But it’s not my natural medium. I get out of practice with any kind of talking-related task very easily, and then it becomes repellent again.
And then there’s being a lousy rememberer. I tend not to remember things that are said to me or that I say myself as well as I do things that are written, so if you’re trying to exchange information with me, it’s best to do it in writing. Then I can refer back to it as many times as necessary until the information sticks. (This is distinct, mind you, from memorizing stuff, which I’m actually pretty good at. If I decide to memorize something, I usually can, even if it’s just a long string of numerals; it’s the more casual don’t-forget-to-buy-toilet-paper temporary kind of information that doesn’t come back when it’s supposed to.) It’s not uncommon that I get off the phone and think, “Shit. Now, what did we just say?”
And, of course, there’s the intrusion issue—I don’t enjoy either interrupting or being interrupted—and I often say out loud when the phone rings, “That can’t be good,” or “That couldn’t possibly be anyone I want to talk to.” I’m usually wrong, but that’s still my first reaction.
All in all, it adds up to the telephone’s being the physical confluence of a bunch of shit I don’t like.
Am I talking too much?
I came here from a search for “phone aversion.” I’d love to know why I hate the phone so much. I’ve read all your comments, and it’s interesting to hear why other people are phone averse. But I still can’t work out why I hate the phone so much. I’ve never really liked it, but it has gotten a LOT worse. In fact, I need to make a call right now, and am procrastinating. It’s a happy call - a much-loved friend’s birthday, someone I haven’t seen in four years since I moved to the other side of the world - but I still don’t want to make the call. I’ll talk to strangers, I’ll email, I’ll text, I’ll talk the ears off my friends, and I even don’t mind public speaking… but I don’t even like calling my mother (who I email several times daily). I don’t even like making calls at work, or for booking vacations, or calling for movie times (if there’s a chance it will be a live person).
And when I say “don’t like” I mean ABHOR WITH A PHOBIC PASSION.
I hate the phone. I don’t like calling, and I don’t like answering. Happily, my children now answer the phone, and I get them to deal with the callers whenever possible.
I just really wish I knew *why* I feel like this.
I thought I was the only one! Right now 4-5 people are upset with me for not wanting to talk on the phone. All waiting for phone calls. I feels tons of pressure, and the more stressed I get over needing to make the phone call the more I do not want to call at all. The sound of A ringing phone makes me anxious, it’s like the phone is here to bring bad news, the outside world trampling into my personal space. Anyway it is causing conflict in family who want to nosy gossip for 2 hours. Who has 2 hours for such BS? So yeah I have a severe phone aversion:\