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I've been going on for the past few years to anyone who will listen about how much I hate the telephone. Just last week, a blog friend I'd never met and with whom I needed to communicate about something important said something like, "You're not one of those phone haters, are you? Because I attract all of you."
And I had to tell her she was right.
Of course I'm a communication junkie otherwise. I text like crazy. I'm on Twitter a lot and I still love (nice, fun, intellectually engaging) email (that offers me money, tells me I'm pretty and/or isn't a forward.) The first thing I remember from the Internet at all besides dancing GIFs of puppies is AIM, and I'm still on Gchat a ridiculous number of hours a day. I will even talk to you in person, when pressed. But on some day I don't recall during the past several years, I joined the "Don't Call Me" club.
You know the type: send me an email, a text, an owl, anything but please, not the telephone. You may be the type, and if so, you know exactly what I mean, and what a horrible affliction this is.
I'd talk to my sister and my mother, but that was about it. When friends suggested talking on the phone for anything other than immediate, purposeful plan-making, I'd shiver. I can procrastinate a phone call to a basic service provider in more time than it would take me to travel to an appointment and spend an hour in the waiting room dorking around on the iPhone I won't talk into. If phone avoidance was a competitive event, I'd finally be able to medal in something.
The more I delved into social media and digital communication, my tendency to pick up the phone to purposely talk to someone shrunk to essential conversations (Hi Mom!) If I can handle it by email I will, and by text, even better. Can I tweet you without being completely obnoxious? Awesome! And I can accomplish this all while walking the walk of the righteous hatred towards rogue public phone talkers. I've glared countless times at the inevitable cell phone screamer standing way too close to me in line in the coffee shop -- "OMG I KNOW RIGHT? SERIOUSLY OKAY? WHAT? ARE YOU THERE? OMG RIGHT?"
I mean, who were these people? The people of the... telephone? It's much more difficult, it turns out, to delete an unfortunate conversation.
So I read Pamela Paul's anti-telephone screed in the New York Times last week, and nodded my head in righteous agreement. Yeah! No phones is where it's at! Who needs that talky thing? Not us. We run cold, hard electronica, man. Even Miss Manners, Judith Martin, was a source, claiming that she's always preached against the telephone and its "rude propensity to interrupt people."
And then I got to the comments.
A surprisingly measured and distressingly sad batch of Internet article commenters lamented isolation from the outside world and loved ones by disability, age, distance or some combination of life factors, worsened by the loss of telephone time and refusal of, well, anyone, to pick up the phone. Parents said their kids wouldn't talk to them. People wanted to hear the sound of a voice in a new city where they didn't know many people, and certainly not friends. One woman wondered if a friend had ever liked her at all, if it was that easy to ratchet down to words on a screen.
Some combination of East Coast springtime pollen and the knowledge that I'd give countless more dollars than I had to talk to my grandma on the phone -- the only mode of communication she ever knew -- again made me tear up. I began to wonder what was wrong with me.
I guess it does seem a little crazy that in a gadget-obsessed era where it seems like every other commercial is for a mobile telephone, that so few people want to talk into them. I'm the first to admit that my iPhone's relatively ear-unfriendly design and so-so reception isn't one of my top priorities because I'm most concerned about how efficiently it downloads my email and hooks me up with Angry Birds.
And yes, it can be a time suck. I've had probably hours of eye-glazing conversations with people that lasted many minutes beyond the point of boredom and repetition, and of course
