Facebook me. Email me. Tweet me. Send me a letter via snail mail.
Drive to my house, and talk to me in person.
But don’t call me. I hate talking on the phone.
Well, if you’re driving to my house it’s OK to call ahead, and give me a heads up. That way I can hide all the dirty dishes in the sink in the basement, and wipe up the splatters my six year old left on the floor around the toilet.
But, save the chit-chat for when you get here.
I’ve never liked talking on the phone. I wasn’t one of those teenage girls who spent hours on it with my friends.
I don’t know why I dislike talking on the phone exactly. It just always seems awkward to me. You’re talking to someone, but there aren’t any visual ques to help you interpret what’s going on. Is the long silence because they’re bored with you, or are they just shushing their kid who’s yanking on their pant leg?
The other problem with the phone is that it interrupts. For some reason we feel this sense of urgency when the phone rings. Even if we’re in the shower, we’ll streak through the house, clad only in a towel, wet hair dripping, damp foot prints marking our path on the carpet to get to the phone only to realize too late that all the curtains in the house are open.
No. I’ll take email over the phone any day. I’m free to read it, and reply when I feel like it. Emails sent to me at 5:30 in the afternoon don’t interrupt dinner with the family. There aren’t any awkward pauses. I can send an email even if my kid is screaming in the background that his brother touched his foot, and how dare he! I don’t have to keep trying to send you an email if you’re not available. It goes through the first time, and you can read it when you have time.
I embrace all the other forms of electric communication as well. Twitter, Facebook — they just don’t put the same pressure on you that the phone does.
Am I the only one who hates the phone? There must be someone else out there.
Talk to me. In the comments. Don’t call me about it.
Does this apply to family living overseas? I hope we are the exception. Because living in another hemisphere, on the other side of the International Date Line, I treasure our phone conversations.
Oh my god I totally hate the phone. Just like you I was never a teenager who spent hours and hours on the phone. I so much would rather email, text, facebook. twitter, all of the above.
I’m totally a no-phone call person! I wrote a post about how much I really didn’t like to talk on the phone and how I preferred email/texting. Since then my in-laws will always text me before trying to call! It was the best post I’ve ever written because of the results it got 🙂
You probably got the anti-phone from me. I’ve never got comfortable with talking on the phone because when growing up we didn’t get a telephone way out in the middle no-where until I was fourteen years old. There was only one telephone every half mile. That phone was our neighbors'(Gramps and Mary), and it was one of those wooden crank models that hung on the wall.
My parents could have put one in our house for the cost of $2000, but back in the 1950’s that was a huge amount of money for a family, so we didn’t get a phone until General Teleohone bought out the small local phone company. Now, I know I’m guilty of calling you, but I get so lonesome just to hear your voice or talk to David or just hear Wade and David making noise in the background. To a grandma even the screaming is joy when you can’t see the boys for weeks at a time because of the weather or David’s school breaks don’t coincide with mine. I love you all, Mom otherwise known as grandma.
I can totally relate. I am so easily distracted when I can’t see the person’s expression and I hate those silent moments when you or the other person says…”are you there.”
-Buffi
My Wonderfully Dysfunctional Blog
The phone is a necessity for me and something that I always fall back on but totally agree with you on all the reasons that it stinks! My sister and I talk several times a day because the kids seems to always interrupt our conversations or something requires us to pause our conversation. Very annoying.