In my experience, which is of course biased, most people my age (57 this year) and younger tend to feel this way: voice telephony is the absolute worst option. For me that’s because it’s the worst of interaction worlds: I don’t have the time to ponder what I’m going to say and get the right phrase, as I do in written conversation, but I also can’t read someone’s expression or body language as I would if I were doing it face to face.
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My ability to recognise someone’s voice on the ‘phone is also not good, so I would panic over misidentifying whoever picked up.
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I use(d) email a lot at work, because it comes up surprisingly often that you need to prove in court what someone knew, when they knew it, and if they could have anticipated that it would cause this much damage. So, an email in which I inform them of all these things is very often useful evidence in court.
With people who are not opposing counsel or, worse, prosecutors (document everything, they are public servants, and therefore promoted on the basis of how good they are at deceit, intrigue and making sure that someone else gets the blame), it is often useful to talk to them directly. It is best to meet in person, certainly, but over the phone is still better than email. People find it harder to say ‘no’ to someone they are currently talking to, even if they don’t see them, than to text on a screen. People can read all sorts of things into text which aren’t there and two parties acting in good faith can manufacture a disagreement over a simple misunderstanding.
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I talk to people all day as part of my job so I have no qualms about talking to anyone on any medium!
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Pimpin’ ain’t easy, they say, and they are right. It does require finely honed people skills. Then there are the hippies, who are kind of like herding cats. And travel is always tiring.
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Ha ha - it was a nickname given to me a while back. I work in recruitment for international development organisations.
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My father sells young boys to oligarchs and foreign clubs.
He is a FIFA-licensed Football Agent.
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Absolutely 100% agree. I have hated talking on the telephone since I could do it. At least now we can move around - I tend to pace when I have to talk on the phone at work, I cannot bear sitting still and talking to someone I cannot see.
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I didn’t actually say something, but I had to work very hard to avoid involuntary expressions of disbelief. After me in the line for a cashier at the supermarket was a man whose shoulders were level with the top of my head.
I’m six foot tall (183 cm). That guy must be well over seven feet, because I know a seven-footer, and he’s nowhere near that much taller than I.
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I have a strong preference for workplace conversations by email. Partly this comes from having had managers whose version of history was convenience-based, so being able to point at things they had definitely said was helpful, at least for personal reassurance.* Partly because I did a lot of jobs involving explaining complex processes and policies to people who didn’t know them and weren’t expected to, and writing allows you to spend time working out precisely how much to say, and put in links to useful documents, and write out examples of things - and you can copy them the next time.
At the moment I teach five separate classes, each shared with at least one other teacher, sometimes the same other teacher, and despite my best efforts a lot of handover still happens verbally - usually when someone’s in a hurry, distracted, and trying to finish their lunch - which inevitably means things get miscommunicated or forgotten, and it’s rarely possible to tell who made the mistake.
(* and partly on the flipside, because managers who are doing things calculated to drive you into a nervous breakdown or simply being awful nearly always do it verbally, so I have a virulent reaction to being called to anyone’s office for a conversation)
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When I was a kid I used to love answering the house phone and then passing it off to my parents. Don’t really know when that changed.
I do remember in my first job having a user who would constantly phone me for help rather than email (or even just spend a few minutes figuring it out himself). Ended up turning the ringer down on my phone so I could ignore it.
These days when a company only offers the phone as a method of contacting them it feels like such a chore, but I will endure it.
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I had my LinkedIn account suspended for unspecified reasons. The email notification I got said that I could appeal. The appeal process required that I go online and log in the account I couldn’t log into because it was suspended. I would have loved a phone option.
Assuming they have an actual human on their end, a phone call can be much more efficient than dealing with chatbots.
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Two thoughts on all this:
- Yes it’s a generational thing but also a individual thing. Talking on the phone is a skill, and most of us had to learn it while most people roughly 25 and below did not. You don’t know who is on the line, what they want, what they will say, or how they will respond. As @RogerBW noted, it’s a bit different as well when you can’t see the person, and via phone just anyone can barge into your space. Add to that how the phones have turned into 50% or more sales calls and it’s a terrifying endeavor. Our nanny once heard me answer the phone from an unknown number, orient on the conversation, talk to the person, and finish. She was in awe when I hung up - “how do you do that?”
Practice. Same with answering the door, I guess.
- When I used to manage people, I’d show everyone a matrix. One axis you’ve got modes of communication, boiling down to email, instant message, phone, in person. Other axis you have content/intent - for instance, transferring detailed information, kicking off a project/longer conversation, or hashing out an area of uncertainty.
Each topic has a medium it’s best suited for. And each person has a personal preference about how they like to be communicated with.
Wouldn’t be able to count the number of times I heard “I’ve reached out to X a dozen times and can’t get a response.” “Have you tried switching channels?” [later] “Ok, I gave a call and it’s taken care of now.”
Just the right tool for the right person / topic.
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I used to run the sales department in a small R&D company selling research equipment (optical spectroscopy and solar simulators, primarily).
Employee: “I can’t get this professor to commit to placing an order.”
Me: “Have you called the customer?”
Employee: “I emailed him yesterday and last week.”
Me: “Yes, but have you called the customer.”
Employee: “He doesn’t like to be called. He’s a professor, he’s too busy.”
Me: “Call him. Right now. Pick up the phone and give him a call.”
Employee: “I mean… okay…”
(Five minutes later)
Employee: “Okay, he’s placed the order.”
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One thing phone calls excel at are chasing down something. Call a likely provider up, and when they can’t do it, ask for a referral to someone who can. then call and say “Sal at said you might be able to help”, rinse lather and repeat. No one is going to respond to an email and write “you could ask Joe at …” when it’s so much easier to ignore the message, or just say “no”.
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By way of an Asterisk linux container, a Grandstream FXS ATA, and a low-cost SIP trunk provider, I have resurrected the “home phone” in, probably, the most millennial tech parent way possible.
My kids are now learning how a home phone works and, if I can coax their friends’ parents into getting their own landlines, how to take agency for their own intra-neighborhood communication (instead of, “Dad, can you text [person]’s dad to see if they can play with me?”)
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When I joined my current company, the HR guy gave a list of important people I’d have to interact with. Some prefered Slack. Others didn’t use Slack. Some were only on WhatsApp. Others wanted SMS texts. Some responded to email; others did not. No consistency of communication. No one has a desk phone. At my previous job, the only calls I got were spam, so I eventually disconnected it.
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My house has a built in cubby for a phone, with a shelf below it for a phone book. So I put a sip phone there, configured to talk directly to the trunk end point, no pbx. It’s now no longer cheap, because the city charges $5/mo in 911 taxes. (of the roughly $9 it cost last month, $6.50 are assorted 911 fees…)
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That sounds complicated!
We bought a telephone and plugged it in to the phone socket.
Although tbf the home phone didn’t need resurrecting as loads of people still have them.
We did buy a an actual old phone though, with a dial and the proper ringing noise. 'Tis both a thing of beauty and a bona fide historical/cultural artefact.
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Asterisk definitely tries to be a hobby more than a tool.
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