The worst is actually initiating a call. I really have to force myself to do that. Left to my own devices, I won't.
We had a landline the first 2 years we retired; however, Central Florida is a wild and woolly place. The number of strange calls one receives on a landline during the day is alarming. Especially when the bad guys figure out you are retired. They want your money, and they are willing to nag and negotiate all day, every day, to trick you out of it. Even if I didn't pick up, I could still hear the rings and messages. I finally blew up and had it disconnected.
Now I use my cell phone. I hate talking on that even more than a landline because I figure it will give me a brain tumor. Plus, you can't tuck a smartphone between your ear and shoulder to talk. You have to hold it, and you have to hold it for a long time. Consequently, you are complicit in giving yourself a brain tumor.
Actually, I rarely answer my phone or check my messages. Dodging a phone call is both liberating and delightfully perverse. Good times!
I am happy to make arrangements to chat with loved ones. Family and friends have learned to text me first to let me know when they will call. With advance warning I WILL pick up the phone, although I have to find it first.
You made me laugh out loud. Thank you for that. I could have written this post, and now I won't have to! I hate talking on the phone too.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Robin. Actually, I would enjoy reading a post by you on the same subject.
DeleteSomeone posted about a slip on shoulder holder for long cell phone calls. I can spend an hour or more catching up with my far away BFF's. I need to find that, for the convenience.
ReplyDeleteI think the cancer thing has permeated among my granddaughter's generation. They all seem to use earphones. The phone is still in their pocket, though.
The youngsters text, too. I like to text. I can think about the texts I receive and reply when I want to.
DeleteI'm not sure whether you knew Lucy before she withdrew from blogging a couple of years ago. She encouraged me to start blogging in 2008 and we had a good deal in common: both Francophiles, both house owners in France (she still lives there), etc, etc. Inevitably our email exchanges tended to centre on speaking and understanding French. My linguistic abilities are beginning to die away but I still need to phone France when reserving restaurants and booking events prior to villa holidays there.
ReplyDeleteI take up the phone reluctantly these days but my problems lie at the other end of the call: how do you prepare to bring a phone conversation to a polite end? Anglo-Saxon methods ("Be seeing you.", "Nice talking to you.") just don't work. I felt sure Lucy would know the answer but, while recognising the problem, she admitted she didn't. Might this be part of your phone antipathy or are you perfectly equipped for this minor social obligation?
I am an American born and bred in the industrial upper Midwest. Which is to say I was roughly, not gently, bred. For example, my father used to end a conversation by exclaiming "No more talk!" My siblings and I still laugh about that. You really must laugh about something like that, it is hilariously rude.
DeleteI usually end a phone call by telling some kinder version of the truth. If it is a girl friend, I can easily reveal I have to go to the bathroom. It is usually true, and women know that. For others, I may say I am exhausted from holding the cell phone to my ear, which is also usually true. If all else fails, then I continue to talk until I have something else I have to do. Make dinner. Pick up my grandson from school. Go grocery shopping. Clean the kitchen. One of my older sisters once refused to let me go even when I told her I needed to. I told her three times. She kept talking. Finally I screamed, "I have to go or else I'm going to slit my throat!" I think I eventually had to hang up on her. We do what we must.
In truth, I do dread ending a phone call, but I don't suffer much over it. Mostly, I dread picking up the phone because I'm nervous about what might happen next. Especially if I don't recognize the phone number.
I'm sorry, I don't know Lucy's blog. However, if you give me the blog name I will look to see if it is still up.
DeleteI'm with you. The exception is that I love to hear from my children and grandchildren any time. I finally gave in and learned that impersonal of all communications. I now can text. My grandchildren seem to prefer this form.
ReplyDeleteI prefer texting, too. It is the only way I ever hear from grandchildren. I actually love hearing from my sisters and brother via phone. And my dearest friends.
DeleteThe phone! Absolutely hate it. I would disconnect mine if it wasn’t for my husband. All I’m doing is paying for telemarketers to phone me.
ReplyDeleteI don't like being available to everyone at any time.
Delete"Dodging a phone call is both liberating and delightfully perverse. Good times!"
ReplyDeleteIt was such a relief to me when email became an option, and I could contact people without having to spend time talking on the phone!
Although I don't mind talking on the phone, I didn't used to know how to end a conversation. Somehow I had learned in childhood that it was rude for me to end a telephone conversation. When I think this over, it doesn't make any sense! With few exceptions, I felt I was always the "nondominant" person, and my odd belief (I must have learned it somewhere) was that the "dominant" person was the only one who could end the conversation. My belief was that if I ended the conversation, the "dominant" person would be angry with me. Isn't this weird? It must have come from growing up in a family where there was a rigid hierarchy and severe punishment for questioning or upsetting anyone. Fortunately, I have not had that belief for years!!!!
It was a happy day in the early 1980s when I learned that I could turn off the ringer on our home phone and not have my life be interrupted by a ringing phone, rarely from someone I wanted to talk with. This did lead to anger from my former husband when I would forget to turn the phone back on and he wanted to reach me. I learned from that experience to turn the phone back on!
I held out on getting a message machine until it became necessary. When some people found that they couldn't reach me easily, they gave up, which was okay with me!
It is only in the last 2 months that I gave up my landline. I use my cell phone in the same way I used my landline. I am not available to talk unless I am at home, and I feel like talking. I use email for much of my communication. So far, I am not using texting. Because I deactivated my Facebook account a few weeks ago, I don't have that option for communicating either.
Thank you for opening this up for discussion. I do like communication in writing! I have a few friends who still write letters, and I hope to catch up on my letter-writing soon.
Excessive and entrenched manners can be oppressive. I try very hard to use the very simplified golden rule as my guiding light. It cuts through all the cultural and class nonsense we have all had to suffer through. In this case, I would not want to learn that someone I was talking with wanted to end a call but was reluctant to do so because they didn't want to hurt my feelings. I would want them to end the call. I am hoping they would want the same for me?
DeleteI'm happy you were able to escape that family hierarchy with your intelligence and sensibility intact. And as for letters, I wish I still received some. They were fun.
Here is a link to what I believe is Lucy's blog:
ReplyDeletehttp://box-elder.blogspot.com
I just read her last post. It is worth reading.
I didn't follow her blog but had been aware of her presence since I first began to blog. She was on many blog lists.
Thank you. I am intrigued.
DeleteSame here.
ReplyDeleteWe both duck and cover when the landline rings and often only answer when we can see who calls and afterwards we get mad at each other and argue for a while (why didn't you pick it up, why did you make me run for it - and so on). And we argue about each other's cell phones as well, mostly because one of us (or both) is not available because it's flat or hidden somewhere. My daughter who lives in NZ announces her intentions to call days in advance via text message while nine out of ten times she is unavailable when we call - unannounced. To think that there was a time when she would hog the one landline phone we had for most of the day and night!
My father uses the phone to inform but not to listen. He has hearing aids but they are never on and he usually calls at midday from his sitting room where he has a large standing clock which then rings twelve times while he talks.
For a while we got several telephone survey calls a day and in the end I just fabricated my answers (mother of five, aged 23, three university degrees, four cars, no driver's licence, prefer red to white wine, on social welfare etc.) until the calls miraculously stopped.
It is funny how you handled the surveys. I have not had a survey call since I got rid of my landline. So far, no one icky has my cell phone number. T and I used to argue the same way about the landline. Much like we used to argue in the middle of the night when the baby started crying a million years ago.
DeleteAnd, of course, your father never fails to fascinate me. He is, as we used to say in the late 1960's, a trip.
DeleteDang, and I was just going to call you....haha!
ReplyDeleteNo land line here. There is a thing called the "Oregon No Call List". They have to leave you alone or risk penalty. Sometimes it even works.
I usually loose my phone so there's no problem. But yes, you are so right - who the hell invented these things so that you absolutely can NOT hold them between your ear and shoulder unless you are 20 years old or younger?!
It is probably best for the old neck in the long run, but I lose patience fairly quickly when holding it up to my ear. I can't tell you how many phone calls I've missed because I can hear the damn thing ringing, but cannot find it.
DeleteWe have blocked many nuisance call on our phones. We also have Caller ID. If we don't know the #, we don’t answer. However, the ringing is annoying so we got nomorobo and that has gotten rid of most. The world has gotten so very noisy.
ReplyDeleteVERY noisy. Interested in what this nomoobo is. Will have to google it.
DeleteI hate the phone too and never equated it with how often I had to use one in my Corporate Lives, until you mentioned it, so perhaps my aversion is Career related, who knows? I just know the Landline does get a lot of Spam Calls, tho' we keep it... and the Smart Phones seem more of a Leash to me than I'm comfortable with. Not to mention how addicted the rest of the population seems to be to their devices to an annoying degree IMO, especially while driving or doing anything that should have their focus rather than whatever call they're on... or Texting as they careen down the road. I had to smile about the Brain Tumor thing becoz it does seem to me that general population is behaving as if most of them already have one growing rapidly and replacing brain matter? *winks*
ReplyDelete