Personally since chat/messages are now ubiquituous, call implies you need my reply/attention/input now, and/or need the vocal tonal part of communication.
If you call, and it’s clear there was neither reason, I’m annoyed. There was no reason to interrupt me, as I’ll assume there’s an emergency or urgent situation and pick up dropping whatever I’m doing.
There are exceptions of course, but nowadays those (like family get-togethers or check-ins) have honestly moved to group video chats so they’re not “calls”, either.
At my workplace, the response time for text-based messages (eg via Teams) varies wildly. Sometimes I get a response promptly. Sometimes it’s same day, sometimes it’s later that week, and sometimes I don’t get a response at all. So unfortunately the best way to get an answer I need is to just call them. Do I need that information that instant? Not necessarily, but I can’t risk the message being put off/ignored/forgotten for a week or more.
For me I hate phone calls because it’s someone demanding I drop what I’m doing to address whatever they want. Keep in mind, 99% of phone calls I get are at work form co-workers.
The number of “quick calls” that are actually quick I can count on 1 hand, and still have room for more. I have tasks to accomplish, things to do. And I’m spread so thin between all the things I do, there’s a fair chance I’m going to forget something about what you asked/told me. If it’s in text form I can review it when I loop back to it. You need me to check/validate/run something, cool. I have record of what, when, and if I completed it. Just because you have a question does not make it an emergency on my part.
As for my home phone, the only folks who ever call me are either telemarketers or scams. If a friend called I’d probably answer (if I have the time). But I think most of my friends are in the same boat, we have so much to do these days (non-recreation) that it’s just not easy to find time. A lot of my friends have side-hustles or a second job or are in class (like me) in order to stay competitive. When I was a kid, I remember my parents could unwind at the end of the day, friends would just come over to hang out. It just ain’t like that no more.
Just because you have a question does not make it an emergency on my part.
This is it for me. If someone is an auditory processor, or needs a more nuanced conversation in order to understand something, I sympathize. But not everyone is like that. Just send a quick message asking to chat (or better yet, find time on my calendar if it’s for work), and then I can prepare what I know on the subject, review it, and get back to you.
Otherwise you’re going to get an ear full of ummmmmmmmmmmmmmm
uhhhhh hmm
hang on, I was just
hang on, just loooking that upp…
click
scroll
scroll
click
click
scroll
scrolllll
Right, so
(silence while I’m reading)
Right, uh, so
Okay
It was last Tuesday
Was that it?
My biggest reason for not liking calls is that I often very much struggle to actually hear what’s being said. I’ll take talking in person over a call. Text mediums also have the benefit of being able to be referred back to. Great to double check something, or to cover your ass. I’ll take a paper trail any day of the week.
That said though, in my professional life I have encountered a surprisingly huge number of people who just cannot write clearly. It baffles me. Ultimately, to each their own, and I’ll try to meet people where they’re at. But I much prefer written formats.
In a world where async communication is effortless, demanding immediate attention is antisocial.
You’re saying that you don’t care what I’m doing at the moment. You want my full attention immediately. Even leaving a message is more of a time waste than a simple text message
- don’t call unless it’s urgent
- if you’re calling me it’s not urgent
This doesn’t apply to landlines, ofc
Strong disagree. A phone call isn’t a demand, and doesn’t mean that you don’t care what the other person is doing. It’s a request to talk to them, and can always be declined. Some things are more quickly and easily sorted out by phone call than text.
Add, some things are time sensitive; which means yes, I do need your attention immediately
I guess that can be true because my phone is usually on silent, but a message would still be preferable because a missed call in my notifications doesn’t tell me much of anything.
I would also put forward that a request to talk could also take the form of a request to talk, like hey are you free to talk about my part in the xyz project?
PS. I would ask the people who you call if they would prefer a text first. It could be you’re calling people who are like you, but it’s also possible that you’re calling people like me, and they’re too polite to tell you.
People in the comments claiming it’s social anxiety but I have no problem talking to people face to face or in an internet-based voice or video call. But phone calls are just ass. The audio quality sucks, I barely understand what the other person says and I don’t get to choose when and where it happens, might be one or both people are in some noisy situation etc and it’s just all around so awkward. I also think it’s kinda rude. A message is “Hey I want to exchange X information, reply whenever you want”, a call is “YOU WILL PAY ATTENTION TO ME RIGHT NOW”. It’s also incredibly annoying when some official place insists on phone calls only. Fucking brilliant, now I have to take half an hour of my day queueing and/or calling repeatedly to get done what I would have typed out in half a minute as an email. It’s even worse if it’s them who call you. “You will get a call from us in the next 3 days”. Now I have to be on fucking high alert to be available at that exact time or the back and forth missed calls start. Instead of just receiving an email and replying whenever.
Edit: not to even mention that text is permanent and can be referenced later while calls are not
This is the correct answer.
This was a teacher that told me in the 90s. “Phone calls are an invasion. When you call someone you’re saying ‘stop everything you’re doing and talk to me’. This was specially true when Caller ID was not a thing.”
Leaving a message equals to a DM or text. The recipient can respond later, but a call, it must be at that moment. It’s synchronous.
And people who use text apps for synchronous communication are holding it wrong. I shouldn’t be expected to respond immediately to a slack message.
Your not. They have false expectations and that’s their problem.
It infuriates me when I’m talking to someone, their phone rings, and they instantly take the call while I’m still talking. It’s like someone interrupting me and they instantly switch focus to the other person, like what they have to say is more important than me.
And it irritates my friends how I’ll quickly check who it is, then ignore the call while someone is talking to me. “Aren’t you gonna take that?” No, I’m listening to you right now.Leaving a message equals to a DM or text. The recipient can respond later
You’ve never met my wife.
Agreed. There are only three modern/common communications channels which are truly synchronous:
- In-person communication
- Phone calls
- Video calls
Everything else is asynchronous, and does not necessarily involve an interruption or a disruption of your time - you can get to it when you want to, within polite reason.
And with the fragmentation of our attention due to social media - to say nothing about the broader nature of our modern culture - being able to handle communication asynchronously is becoming very important to people.
I don’t have a problem with phone calls and prefer them for urgent matters, but people need to stop with the preamble and reiterations. Asking me if I have time takes as much time as just telling me what you have to say. I already know you don’t really care if I have a moment because you’ll just say what you want regardless of my answer.
One thing that severely degrades the usefulness of the phone network is all the spam calls. It’s all I get these days. I can’t just call someone and have them pick up because nobody answers calls from unknown numbers.
It’s especially frustrating when I’m waiting for a call, like for a delivery, and have to pick up every unknown number.
ETA: Also, the immediacy of phone calls make them mainly used for emergencies. If I get a call from someone I know the first thought is “oh god what’s wrong?”
So I don’t call people because I don’t want to freak them out.
excellent point.
How is spam calls such a problem? Have probably had 2 cold calls the last 10 years. In norway you register on a goverment do-not-cold-call list and basically I have not gotten sales calls since.
Sadly, I live in the USA and do not have a functioning government. We can’t get health care, let alone reliable span call blocking.
“Do not call list” more like “Look at that list of numbers to call”
Unfortunately I’ve heard the list is not well-enforced, so the do-not-call list functions more as a list of confirmed working numbers with humans on the other end. That’s why I’ve never tried using it…
I get probably 5 spam calls a week so if that keeps growing, I might have to give it a try…
I wouldn’t be surprised if the scammers used my country’s do-not-call list as a list of known live numbers to call. Because no one’s enforcing it and you don’t really know who’s calling with the number is spoofed.
How is having a functioning government? I hear it’s wonderful
It’s more of a problem in different countries. Also I find there’s a blitz every now and then and I’ll get 3+ spam calls a day, and then months without any.
I get about 10-15 spam calls a day, but I do have two business lines forwarded to my personal phone too. If I do answer a call from a number I don’t know because I’m expecting a call, and it turns out to be spam I just hang up immediately.
I want shit that leaves a record so when someone pulls a “I didn’t say red”, I can pull out the text or DM or whatever, and say, “So when you said red here was it that special red that’s actually blue?”
Do the people around you do that a lot?
You’d be surprised how often honest disagreements arise from bad recollection. It doesn’t have to be ill-willed: we’ve all had the experience remembering a shared conversation completely differently from the person we had it with.
Sometimes I forget that some people actually make it in life. That they are left so intensely naive from living in a good place, surrounded by good people.
Good for you.
Two words for me. Read. Receipts. I have found that someone will inevitably text me and say, “why didn’t you respond?” Fucker. You texted me. Want me to actually engage with you? Call me. Otherwise you’re now at my mercy.
I prefer calling because it’s easy to silence and just let it go to VM if I am busy. Call back immediately and that’s usually a sign of being needed.
I say this as an autist who used to fucking loathe talking on the phone: Its that the phone takes up too much mental energy and time, yet has a time limit on your own responses. Its hellishly stressful when you are socially incompetent, and now a lot of even non-autistic people are becoming socially incompetent.
Now its funny, I hated phone calls back when everyone liked them. Now I’m pretty OK at them because I worked at a call center for a year and now it seems like everyone now hates phone calls. I kinda recognize that the one nice thing about phone calls is there is no “set up your account before ordering your food” type bullshit. There is a consistency to phone calls.
I think I’m fairly neurotypical but I don’t like calls either (though I recognize some things are better on a call). for me it’s just that it’s feels unnatural that you’re supposed to be talking to someone just as you would normally but there’s no visual component. it’s awkward. imagine two people in the same room having a conversation but they’re looking at the wall instead of each other.
There’s also a faster sense of done-ness with a phone call: the conversation is almost always over at the end of the call, whereas with something like text it can take ages because it’s so spread out.
That… and my insecurity as to what a sane-and-polite-but-not-overdone phrasing would be fades quicker than when that phrasing has been immortalised through writing. It’s just over sooner (provided you actually manage to get through to someone)
Not having to be available at the ready for people is great.
If you arrange for a call, through another asynchronous mechanism, then it’s fine. If you cold-call me to ask about the weather (or, more seriously, anything that could have been a text message), I’ll leave decapitated horse head in your fridge.
How is skywriting so low on the list?
It’s not very good at night
Voicemail should be lower on that list, I’d rather take a call than check voicemail any day.
Not once have I had a usable voice mail UI. Forced to go through 10 seconds of menu between each message to delete and select the next one, and 90% of them are people just hanging up after realizing they hit voice mail. Then the few times I do get an important message, I have to replay the full message multiple times to transcribe the number I need to call. No seeking, no ending the playback after I’ve passed the bit I needed, often terrible audio. Why do you do this when you have my email?
My iPhone just has a list of them where you can tap one and see a transcription I can quickly read to confirms it’s spam, does your phone not?
Maybe the speech recognition has improved since I last gave automatic transcription a shot, but in my experience it was almost always laughably bad.
I have to use 3CX for work and it’s the least bad voicemail I’ve had any experience with. Literally emails me the .wav so I can listen with VLC.
Sometimes I play techno and pretend I’m getting missions in armored core. Almost doesn’t suck.
I’m glad ring central let’s you delete in mass and transcribes them. Not listening to that shit.
Its my right to be not reachable, outside of work i will take time for your matter when its fitting for me.
And im forgetful and prefer to be able read important information again.
Thats why my phone is always on mute and my voice recorder tells people my email address.
Why are people so offended over the fact there are some ppl who don’t like phone calls? 🤷♀️ who cares
It’s kinda childish, especially when you need something done now that requires details and understanding with no failure.
Edit: not to say you can’t achieve this with other forms but the idea that there aren’t millions of situations where you picking up the phone is more advantageous than a text.
Where’s the humanity in us all
Example and my ass just got outta bed and the coffee is still drippin’…if I have any questions, I can refer to the text instead of calling your ass…I do shit late, want a call at 2am?
Clearly not. Business calls should happen during business hours only. BUT, it is also pretty clear that direct speech is the most efficient way of communication when you don’t need a written record, so calls definitely have a purpose.
Nothing you want needs to be done immediately. NOTHING.
especially when you need something done now that requires details and understanding with no failure.
That’s about the only reason a call is better and should be scheduled as a meeting If at all possible. If there’s no need to have a back and forth conversation just text or email so I don’t have to disrupt the half dozen other things I’m currently working on to deal with you. As for humanity I spend enough time interacting with people I don’t want to talk to. I’m not hurting for more.
Yeah but the world’s not just some corporate environment where you can just schedule a call, nor is it all about wither or not you feel like you want to talk to people or not.
I mean it sounds like you’re talking about specific scenarios in your life and not considering that picking up a phone and talking to someone is not much different than walking over to your neighbors and asking to borrow their wrench.
Sure you could text, but for god sakes man, where’s your humanity?
Maybe life is a lot different than it used to be but when I look around at all these people defending so vigorously anti social behaviour, I can’t help but think that inherently something is wrong.
walking over to your neighbors and asking to borrow their wrench.
This is exactly the kind of thing that could be easily addressed via a text message. “Hey do you have a <x> wrench I can borrow?” That’s a Yes/No question. Nothing to go back and forth over. If you want to chit chat you can do so when they bring it over.
Sure you could text, but for god sakes man, where’s your humanity?
Where’s your humanity? By calling someone you are demanding their attention NOW. Even if they don’t intend to answer, their phone ringing for 30 seconds is annoying and distracting. Just hearing the damn thing go off elevates my stress level. As opposed to a text or e-mail they can respond to at their convenience and only gives them a simple notification. Expecting someone to drop everything to address your needs instantly is more anti-social than respecting that they may be busy right now and send a text instead. I was raised to be respectful of others’ time when asking someone for something.
I can’t help but think that inherently something is wrong.
There is. Talking on the phone has been turned into a miserable experience 90% of the time. We’re sick and tired of dealing with people’s bullshit at our shitty jobs all day and then getting spam calls when we’re at home. Having to drop everything to deal with a phone call is annoying and we don’t want more of it. There’s nothing “inhuman” about being stressed out and tired. There’s about 6 people on this planet I enjoy speaking to and the odds that it’s one of them calling when my phone rings are next to 0.
Idk man. Sounds like you’re projecting quite a lot lol.
I for one will continue the tried and true act of comradery amongst my fellow peers and continue to recognize that we live in a society with many facets of living. You can do whatever you want, but I like the idea of spontaneously sparking up conversations with strangers and neighbours and friends and family. It might be the worst thing ever to you, but using the phone to call people in the real world is no big deal lol.
I’m not projecting, I’m giving you my perspective. You can ignore it if you wish but there’s a subset of people who your behavior is pissing off. Spontaneous conversation isn’t as fun a time for everyone as you seem to think it is.
And my perspective is that if you’re going to get pissed off about things like this then you should probably have a long hard look at yourself in the mirror lol.
Also in my experience it’s not that hard to play the field and figure out when people you are talking to want to talk or want to just get straight to the point. 🤷🏻
People who are so used to getting everyone to stop what they’re doing get upset when they aren’t the center of attention.
