20 ms·

I hate telephones

• mrmondo 9y ago
  Not alone here, I have my work phone unplugged or permanently on do not disturb (straight to voicemail which gets converted into text in an email), likewise on my cell phone I reject almost all calls and an automatic reply via text saying “I’m sorry, I’m not able to take your call or you’re calling for an unknown number, please email or iMessage me instead”, if the number calling is a land line my carrier converts this to a robo-voice and calls them back to say this, if the number is blocked - tough luck. Not only are 99% of phone calls a waste of time, you’re inefficient with no written log of the conversation (not even for security but also to improve workflow and prioritisation / memory recall), furthermore the impact of the context shifting from what I’m currently working on / deep in thought over to a jarring phone conversation at the time that suits the caller - is incredibly disruptive.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• georgespencer 9y ago
  Same for doorbell. I flat out won't answer the front door if someone rings it and I'm not expecting anyone.
  • bahjoite 9y ago
    People should send calling cards ("Hi, it's so-and-so, wish to call on you at your convenience") and wait for a response. Same for telephones (send an email/text message first).
  • brightsize 9y ago
    Same here. Anyone at my door who I don't expect is either proselytizing for their religion (looking at you Mormons and JWs), begging for money, or trying to sell me something.
    • pm215 9y ago
      I think the most common unexpected caller for me these days is a delivery person asking me to take in a parcel for some neighbour who isn't in...
• ducttape12 9y ago
  Sounds to me like this guy has an anxiety disorder that he's masking as a hatred of phones.
  • kyberias 9y ago
    Yeah, let's make diagnoses of people we don't know because of some blog post.
    • microcolonel 9y ago
      "Sounds to me" is a bit soft to come off as a diagnosis to me.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    • khazhou 9y ago
      The guy shared his personal issues in great detail. What's unfair about readers drawing some conclusions from it?
    • robbrown451 9y ago
      So how are you supposed to intelligently take in an article like this if you can't speculate on the causes of the trauma he reports? "Diagnosing" someone is by definition done by an expert. Having a suspicion as to the cause of something (even if that cause might be a mental disorder), is something regular people do, in order to make good decisions.
      • kyberias 9y ago
        Because there are a lot of interesting topics in his blog post that can be discussed that have nothing to do with whether he has some disorder or not. For example, I can actually pretty much relate to this guy's feelings about telephones. Is it also caused by me having some mental disorders?
  • 9y ago
• __s 9y ago
  Me too. No land line, no mobile. I don't have an anxiety response as detailed here so much as a properly calibrated respect for my own uninterrupted time. Job wants me to get a mobile phone but we'll see. Email makes sense: it's a pull interface. If you want a push interface to communicate with me you'll have to ring my door bell I recently made the mistake of helping carry the load at work by answering the phone there. It's alright, mostly scripted, & my lack of customer friendliness (Surprising the amount of silence yes/no answers invoke) will hopefully transition us away from having a developer handling support calls soon
  • albertgoeswoof 9y ago
    Probably might be best if you tell someone about your inability to do customer support than have them find out the hard way...
    • __s 9y ago
      They're aware. I said I hate phones in my interview. We're a small company that recently had a third of the company leave. We're getting me to focus on streamlining triage for support emails, where my ability to dig into SQL & RTFS can be done without a client on the line
  • ghaff 9y ago
    You do realize that you likely wouldn't have a job without those annoying customers who are calling for support?
    • __s 9y ago
      Wow presumptious much? I didn't call the customers annoying-- though I'll admit sometimes you get that person. Most of the time people are happy to be interacting with someone who at leasts knows what they're doing & can solve their problem. Woe is me for being problem oriented rather than customer oriented You do realize those annoying customers wouldn't have anything to call about if it without those introverted developers who are busy programming whatever's been management's whim since last sprint?
• PuffinBlue 9y ago
  I wonder if this might be a general trend as the bulk of communication has pretty much already moved to text. If not outright phobia, at least dislike of the medium of 'speaking' would seem to be likely. More companies might need to accelerate towards offering text/chat options for their customer service if they don't already. It may not directly put a customer off, but it might be another signal in a list of comparisons that pushes the scales in favour of a competitor.
• modzu 9y ago
  async ftw
• ghaff 9y ago
  I'm about to ditch my landline and one of the main reasons (in addition to not using it much) is that legitimate calls are far outnumbered by junk calls. I don't answer numbers I don't recognize but it's still a distraction. There seems to be some principle in play where the misuse of a communications channel rises to the point where it's annoying but not quite unusable. If I got 20 junk calls a day, I'd have to turn my phone off. As it is, it's at nuisance level but still usable.
  • hnarn 9y ago
    Out of curiousity, when were you born? I was born in the 80's, and among my friends literally noone has a landline, not even the older ones. There's simply no argument for it. I'm in northern Europe by the way.
    • ghaff 9y ago
      A long time ago :-) A couple of reasons. - Until we switched wholesale to a videoconferencing provider, I pretty much needed a landline for work purposes. In addition to just routine conference calls, our webcast provider wanted us on landlines when we gave webinars and I had little desire to go into the office at 11pm at night for the Asia Pacific webcast slot. - I get poor cellphone reception at my house. Not really an issue now with WiFi assist but I pretty much needed a landline (actually Comcast triple-play) before that. - I preferred having phones throughout the house and having an emergency backup. - I like/liked the ability to give out a legitimate phone number that is not my cell.
    • Trav5 9y ago
      Not OP, but same here. Born in the 80s and only our parents have landlines. Though my mobile and office phone receive far more spam calls than real calls. My Google voice line gets a hand full of robot voicemails per day. The "Should I answer?" app blocks a lot, but not all.
      • mikestew 9y ago
        Born in the 60s, old enough to be your parent: no landline at our house in I don’t know how many years. We both have a phone that’s nearby all of the time, what would we do with a landline except as a spam vector? And my parents, who are old enough to be your grandparents? Ditched the landline a couple of years ago. I have no idea what the demographics look like for hardlines anymore.
• Spooky23 9y ago
  This would be appropriately titles “i hate anxiety disorders”
• albertgoeswoof 9y ago
  Unsolicited or unexpected phone calls are annoying, but this guy has an anxiety disorder and should probably attend CBT or psychotherapy as it is obviously significantly impacting his life in a negative way. Also, text is not always a the best way of communicating- a lot of information is conveyed in someone’s voice which is often difficult to put on paper. It can also be way faster to speak to someone, particularly where a problem is a little complex and requires information to be exchanged between both parties multiple times.
  • edflsafoiewq 9y ago
    The lack of information in voice is sometimes a boon. If I am annoyed, I can nevertheless always write perfectly politely, but I cannot always keep the annoyance out of my voice.
    • ihale 9y ago
      I agree. I loathe telephones, I also dislike speaking in public, and to people. None the less, I find the inflection, tone, rate of speech all add to meaningful communication. I hate my own voice, so I dislike speaking, but if I find comfort with whom I am speaking, I find it pleasurable, and perhaps more informative than else. It is the human level of it.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • reificator 9y ago
      Most of the time I'm with you, but it works both ways. I accidentally started a fight on HN by typing the exact opposite of my views, or at least something that could apparently be interpreted that way. I don't think I would have been misunderstood in the same manner in speech. In speech your voice determines your tone. In text your reader determines your tone.
  • Tharkun 9y ago
    Have you considered not diagnosing mental illnesses in HN comments? Let alone offering "treatment advice" on a case you know nothing about, without having spoken to the person in question?
• mac01021 9y ago
  I solve this problem by having Google voice and a phone that I can use to make calls, but usually don't receive calls on. Missed calls and voicemail show up in my email, transcribed to text and everything. Given this, there is usually no reason to have a phone that can be rung by arbitrary callers.
• xnxn 9y ago
  Preach it. Also, has call quality completely tanked in the last decade or is it just me?
  • ghaff 9y ago
    Sure. Because so many people are using cell phones these days. As a result, you have a lot of poor reception/dropped calls/etc. that would have been unheard of in the days of the Bell system much less newer fiber optic networks. In many things (see also music listening to a large degree) we've regressed considerably in quality to buy convenience.
  • mmagin 9y ago
    Yes, it's all shitty low bandwidth mobile phone voice codecs or VOIP stuff. Good old digital trunk lines (8 bit 8 ksample/sec mu-law -- the same as the .au file encoding, I think) sounded really quite good.
    • StudentStuff 9y ago
      ulaw isn't all that good, but EVRC running at full rate, nevermind how Sprint and Verizon ran it at much less than that just butchers voice calls. Opus will hopefully end the mish-mash of codecs that currently permeate telephony, as it is much higher quality at lower bitrates, and unlike GSM, ulaw, and even G722 (which some call HD Voice) it can handle packet loss gracefully. Makes all commonly used codecs look terrible in comparison.
• microcolonel 9y ago
  I love telephones, they're useful for having efficient and comfortable synchronous conversations. I don't think the level of hatred expressed here is warranted. Yeah, it's annoying when occasionally you receive a phone call at an unwanted hour, but sometimes it's crucial for people to get in contact with you. I have a publicly listed number (in addition to a private one), and I have not received a spam call this year even once. When people call my phone, it is warranted. Telephones remain the best way to contact emergency services, or settle things which you have no option to settle in person.
  • marssaxman 9y ago
    Why do you want to have synchronous remote conversations?
    • tialaramex 9y ago
      Not the above poster but: it is _so_ much faster to figure out what somebody is doing wrong like this. My first preference is a screenshare or video conference, so I can see what they see. Second is a phone call. Third is live chat like IRC or Slack and emails are a distant last place.
    • pfarnsworth 9y ago
      The same reason why sometimes meetings are actually important and faster to come to a decisions than email or chat. When you have all the stakeholders in front of each other, either physically or virtually, information is disseminated and decisions come together much quicker.
      • microcolonel 9y ago
        Indeed, the mythical "good meeting". I swear I've seen it firsthand, but nobody believes me.
        • astura 9y ago
          The only times we've ever had meetings at work they've been good ones! We only have a few a year.
• _nalply 9y ago
  Me, too. I don't hear, so I don't phone. However some business is almost impossible to conduct without phoning. AWS requires identification by phone. Customs tried to call me to ask me something about my bike I sent home from a holiday abroad. Credit cards are only unblocked by a phone call. And so on. (And phone relays are only a partial solution because some commpanies deem them insecure - I have currently a credit card I was not able to unblock, I will send them a cancellation notice.) So, in other words, it's not hatred or perhaps an anxiety disorder, but a real discrimination of a disability, which leads me to agree with Mr Fisher.
  • fivre 9y ago
    Interesting. You don't use TTY devices then? I wouldn't be entirely surprised if those became less prevalent as telephone services decline in popularity, but I'd figured most of the deaf community used them still.
    • _nalply 9y ago
      I don't understand this question. You mean, are AWS, the credit card institution and the customs also using TTY devices? Sorry, no. And since texting (mobile short message service) TTY slowly went out of use, at least here in Switzerland. I still own a TTY device, however I haven't used it for more than ten years. An interesting technical tidbit here: My TTY is using V.21, however with only one channel and with 110 baud. I researched the TTY with recording on a sound card and analysing the tones. Bit 0 is represented by a sinus wave of 1180Hz, 1 by 980Hz with a duration of 9.1ms each. A byte was transferred with 10 bits (total duration 91ms), 1 bit was a stop bit and the other one a parity bit (I am not sure, I forgot some details). Additionally there was a carrier tone at 1080Hz which was held for about 3 seconds after the last byte has been sent. This means it was not possible that both parties simultaneously send. We had a convention that the other party is allowed to answer when we type two asterisks. A phone relay service in Switzerland still continues to use this convention in their JavaScript application. It is a simulation of the old TTY device they sold to people. I think they had to use websockets because every letter is sent to the other party right away.
  • grogenaut 9y ago
• DanBC 9y ago
  James has a disability, and thus can ask for reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010. It's easier to lie and say "I'm deaf" because they have some awareness of that. Also, in England, you can self refer to IAPT and most people start under 6 weeks and 96% of people start under 18 weeks.
  • DanBC 9y ago
    I'm not sure why this has been downvoted. James wrote this: > Recently, when I was at mum’s alone, the house phone rang. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I stood over it, willing it to stop, palms sweating. That meets the UK legal definition of a disability, and under UK law he can ask for reasonable adjustments to avoid telephones. He could give his mental health status as the reason he needs the reasonable adjustment, but most places won't know much about that, and so it would be easier if he used hearing impairment - many places know about hearing impairment, and have processes in place to avoid telephone use. Maybe I should have said I'm speaking from personal experience: I've got a bank and some bits of government departments and some bits of the NHS to use email rather than telephone with me.
• superflyguy 9y ago
  "Last year, I received a series of 3am calls. At the dial tone, which is set to a horrifically unadjustable volume, I was woken from deep sleep to deep panic. " That would be the ringtone. ( I suppose there are a large number of people who have never heard a dial tone.)
  • dialtones 9y ago
    I went to the Badlands in August with my boyfriend and his recent ex’s son who lives with his mom and us at our house. Anyway, we couldn’t set up camp late one night because the site was full, so we got a cheap hotel room. The kid picked up the phone in the room and said: “It’s making a noise.” Boyfriend said: “Maybe you called the front desk by mistake.” Kid said: “No, it’s some kind of buzzing noise.” Boyfriend laughed and said: “Oh, that’s the dial tone!” I immediately felt old. This ten-year-old didn’t know what a dial tone was. It’s easy to forget that kids are growing up with different technology than we did. :)
  • mikestew 9y ago
    Except that checking for a dial tone is mentioned later, so I’m going to go with ESL rather than ignorance of what a dial tone is.
    • skosch 9y ago
      His name is Jim Fisher, and he's from the UK. I do consider it likely he grew up speaking English.
      • mikestew 9y ago
        Hmm, somehow missed that. I guess, then, that the anxiety disorder he describes affects written communication, too.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • wildrhythms 9y ago
    I thought that anecdote was supposed to paint this picture of the overarching fear the author has with telephones. It's like a scene from a horror movie, I thought it was hilarious
• rhapsodic 9y ago
  Usually, posts like this, where the submitter's username matches the domain name of the posted article, get flagged and killed pretty quickly.
  • DanBC 9y ago
    Normally when the submitter only submits things from their own domain; or submits very frequently.
  • dang 9y ago
    Nothing wrong with someone posting their own stuff, if it's good. I haven't read this article, but presumably lots of HN upvoters have assessed it that way.
    • rhapsodic 9y ago
      >Nothing wrong with someone posting their own stuff, if it's good. I haven't read this article, but presumably lots of HN upvoters have assessed it that way. I didn't intend to imply there was anything wrong with it, I was only sharing an observation. And yet, a number of people felt compelled to downvote me because of it.
• ajmurmann 9y ago
  Besides his emotional issues there author touches on a few great points. 1. Why do we use a loose, unstructured medium like voice for customer support and the script and restrict almost everything about it? Maybe basic support would be better in a different medium and only escalations go to phone? 2. Social engineering is still one of the most effective ways of hacking and the phone is a great medium for that. Yet we apparently year the phone like a more secure channel.
  • sweden 9y ago
    Because it is the most simplest and the most spread one? You don't need to sign up for yet-another-communication-service; you are not dependent on corporations like Facebook to conduct your business; you don't need to install an app. What else would you use?
    • icebraining 9y ago
      Chat on their website?
      • StudentStuff 9y ago
        Unreliable, easy to break, no way to contact a user back if they navigate away. Plus most small/medium business websites are simple, static pages currently, with no interactivity, let alone TLS to protect their users conversations.
• stretchwithme 9y ago
  I'd love it if my cell phone auto-screened calls from numbers not in my address book. Give them a special message that explains the only way they'll get through is to leave a message. Or that they can register their number in a public registry that fully explains who they are and then I can decide whether to take calls from that number.
  • charlysisto 9y ago
    Excellent idea, there's a huge market for new phone management apps it seems, what are we waiting for
    • kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
      Mostly no market, given most people would be unwilling to pay for them
  • ghaff 9y ago
    You can sort of do it with an iPhone. Put it on Do Not Disturb except for your contacts. But that will block alerts in addition to calls. I do use that setting at night when I'm traveling. Otherwise I end up sometimes getting junk calls in the middle of the night because of timezone differences.
  • stretchwithme 9y ago
    We also could probably use a system of codes to communicate with automated calling systems so they give up quicker or are able to negotiate a fee they can pay to talk with you. Or leave a text message if you're open to that.
  • Spearchucker 9y ago
    I never answer calls, ever. My voicemail suggests sending me an email. If the caller doesn't, it's like it never happened. The only reason I even have a SIM card is for data/tethering.
    • andai 9y ago
• blfr 9y ago
  Rarely can I get the same level of service out of companies over text that I can easily over the phone. Talking to a human over the phone is by far the most customer friendly medium of communication. I can do it without physically going anywhere, yet I get almost all the benefits of visiting the business. Online chats on websites are usually undermanned and overall useless. On the phone I am sure I have at least one person's attention. The rep isn't trying to talk to five people at the same time, we can both focus on the issue, the back and forth is almost instantaneous, and we can come to some conclusion at the end.
  • ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    It's less about having one person's attention, and more about making the BATNA for solving your problem "customer ties up a CS agent for phone support at $10/hr until the problem gets solved".
    • bdhess 9y ago
      $10/hr sounds high even for on-shore telephone support.
  • jimbokun 9y ago
    Hahaha, like "using the phone" means "talking to a human", that's a good one. Using the phone means 1. Listening to a long list of automated selections, none of which are ever useful (pretty much information more easily available over the Internet). 2. Getting placed on hold for tens of minutes or an hour or more. 3. Talking to someone who will ignore your question and ask if you have tried some obvious or irrelevant option. 4. Forwarded to someone else who might be able to help you with your problem. 5. Maybe getting cut off, needing to start the entire process over again from the beginning. In short, without massive increases in staffing and training, using the phone for customer support is almost always worse than an equivalent text, web, or email based solution. The article went into even more detail about these shortcomings than I did, by the way.
    • blfr 9y ago
• throw401 9y ago
  I hate telephones too, and I DON'T have an anxiety disorder please!!! I'm just not the guy always ready for a call. I rarely pick up the phone or open the door for a unknown call, and yes it can create stress. Quite often I am very focussed and balanced, one call can ruin that state. If you cannot find yourself in this, please don't create a disease out of it.
  • strathmeyer 9y ago
    Yes, things that cause you stress can be neurosis and psychoses. If it ruins your focus it is affecting your life and can be classified as a disorder.
    • jimbokun 9y ago
      How can a phone ringing not ruin your focus? Maybe you never actually focus on anything, and so do not understand the phenomenon?
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      • saltcured 9y ago
        Some of us have a different problem, which is that our focus can endanger us or ruin our marriages. For us, it is easy to tune out things going on around us like phone calls, houses burning down, or our spouse repeating the same question with escalating irritation...
      • DanBC 9y ago
        this is not ruined focus: > Recently, when I was at mum’s alone, the house phone rang. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I stood over it, willing it to stop, palms sweating.
    • megaman22 9y ago
      I guess managers are a disorder then.
• kibwen 9y ago
  I receive about 20 spam calls per day. In contrast, I receive about 0.2 legitimate calls per day. Google itself suspects that these are spam calls, because it pops up a bright red "SUSPECTED SPAM CALLER" warning when the phone begins ringing. And yet, I have found no option to have the phone automatically decline the call. There's not even an option to silence the ringer for any call not from my contacts; I actually had to disable my ringer for all callers, by default, and then manually, one at a time, set a custom ringtone for each of my contacts. This is completely absurd. Why is it so hard to configure my phone to only allow my friends to interrupt me at any moment of the day, rather than any rando? Turns out, I might also hate telephones.
  • auggierose 9y ago
    You can install an app that kills all unknown calls. That's what I did.
    • kibwen 9y ago
      I've certainly thought about it (if anyone wants to suggest one they use, feel free), but I'm always held back by wondering whether or not those apps aren't simply yet another phone-number harvesting operation selling to spammers. (The fact that it would initially seem irrational to target people who are going out of their way to block spam callers would first require the entire notion of spam calling to be rational to begin with.)
      • fossuser 9y ago
        I use nomorobo and highly recommend it. They don’t store your contacts in the cloud and access to contacts is even optional (though they won’t be able to block spoofed ‘neighbor’ calls if you don’t give access, but they can label them). They also market themselves as focused on privacy and they charge a $2/month subscription. I haven’t gotten a spam call since I’ve used them.
    • emodendroket 9y ago
      That doesn't seem like a great idea. Like, one time my wife was hospitalized and they called to tell me. I think I would have been upset with myself if I didn't receive that call because I had installed an app to kill all calls from numbers I didn't recognize.
• sunseb 9y ago
  I agree. Every times I receive a phone call, I know that: Someone wants somethings from me ("please can you do this or that for me"). Or it's bad news. :-/ Email and text messages are better tools for me: you answer when you want to whom you want.
• blacktulip 9y ago
  I must be a very different person compare to the author. I prefer phone calls a lot more than text/emails. Because I can usually get a result in a much shorter timespan.
• ChuckMcM 9y ago
  There are a number of phone answering services that will ameliorate this issue. These guys charge $1/call (http://www.answeramerica.com/telephone-answering-service-prices.aspx http://www.answeramerica.com/telephone-answering-service-pri...) (no relation to them). In terms of startup ideas, there is probably an Uber like service opportunity here. An app where your "operators" can download and put on their phone, and when ever they want to they can put them selves "active" at which point you will route calls to them over your VOIP network, they take calls, record the data (name and number). You pay them per hour to be on-call, your customers pay you per call, and for infrastructure you need an enterprise account with a VOIP provider, a web site, and a way to accept payments. (That might be what Answer America is doing, I don't know but it seems pretty doable)
  • dqv 9y ago
    It sounds like a good idea in theory, and excuse my being unimiginitive, but answering services are even more blue collar than ride hailing. It's a lot of work that I'm not sure many people want (the operators and everyone else involved with running the service). Anyway, the big problem with this concept is the profitability of answering services is predicated on constantly changing the rates and dropping "dead weight clients" (that is an industry term from the guy who facilitates answering service sales). I don't know if this is possible in an uberized answering service. Would answered calls be worth enough that people would pay a higher rate during higher demand periods? I honestly don't think so. The industry could stand some innovation - it is severely lacking. Why is it that 70% of all answering service sites are not served with TLS? (hint: proprietary answering service equipment vendors have choked the industry and now it can't innovate)
    • ChuckMcM 9y ago
      I don't think you're being unimaginative, you're asking good questions. There are a two things which are orthogonal here, one is capturing what might be called 'fractional GDP' from available workers. Basically that is ways in which people are creating an easy way for an individual worker to work or not work based by creating a disintermediated interface between the service users and the service providers. The 'App' economy, the 'Gig' economy, what ever you call it, it tries to create a lightly held employment relationship between service provider and client in the form of an application and a payment provider. The second thing is whether or not there is enough value in a telephone answering service that it can be successfully monetized. That is an operational efficiency question which would depend on some research into the hows and whats of implementing such a service. Customers for such a service go from the rich and famous who might go so far as to hire a staff member to screen their calls, to someone who has never considered it. Using existing infrastructure and full time staff clearly hits a minimum cost point, and then folks like the author of the essay don't get enough value to hire the service at the rates they need to charge. Bottom line is if the service can be restructured in such a way to be additionally more efficient such that you can capture the low end of the market and perhaps serve the upper end at a better rate. If you can that is a business.
• dataker 9y ago
  It's not just customers. I manage teams of support engineers/agents. They will do anything to avoid a phone call. Indeed, almost all the time, phone calls lead nowhere, only to emotional distress. If you have a really serious issue, you need to escalate to an actual software/platform engineer, and that's something that takes hours, if not days.
  • jpatokal 9y ago
    I also manage a support team. Phone calls are indeed not very useful for solving issues, but they are critical for reducing customer anxiety and ensuring that you've understood their problem correctly.
  • fivre 9y ago
    Phone calls in isolation are terrible. I've worked as support for both older and newer service providers. For the older provider, calls reached support agents with all the customer's information readily available, and support agents had easy means to invite customers to screen sharing sessions, so they could see what we were looking at and we could discuss it together. That said, some customers weren't able to share screens (typically because they were working with classified systems), so I acquired the fairly uncommon skill of directing people through a Unix system by speaking commands letter by letter in the NATO phonetic alphabet while navigating through my own example system. That was slow, but it worked, and was necessary given the restrictions. With my newer service provider, phone support is seen as some sort of extra option in case of emergencies, and is treated more or less as a pager system. Calls come in with no context, we do not have screen sharing, and the experience is generally terrible for both the customer and support agent. No means of support is inherently bad, but all means of contacting support have their limitations. Good support departments recognize those limitations and address them, so that all avenues of support are effective for either addressing an issue or communicating why it must be handled via another channel if it's not something that can be resolved at the point of contact.
• cdelb 9y ago
  If I don't recognize a number, or have a scheduled call, I will almost always let the call go to voicemail. Then I'll decide if the call warrants a call back. Usually it doesn't.
• liviu 9y ago
  me, too. i have an old phone, and i keep it just for few people to call me only if its need. i don't call others, i hate phones.
• charlysisto 9y ago
  Phone for me is an intrusion when it's not very close people. I tend to hate phone as well but if the conventions around phoning changed like, you'd systematically agree through messaging on a certain moment to call etc I guess I could reconcile with the dreaded instrument.
• mcculley 9y ago
  I have seen this with young people in general (I don’t know the author’s age). They have anxiety about having a real time conversation on the phone. They don’t seem to have problems talking face-to-face, so it must be related to not being able to see the face of the interlocutor. It is a problem when doing business. Sometimes a phone call is the best way to resolve an issue.
  • johansch 9y ago
    It's a very clear issue affecting loads of millenials.
  • wildrhythms 9y ago
    It's clearly affecting many young people. I think it's generational. If you get the chance I suggest listening to Diane Rehm's segment: https://dianerehm.org/shows/2016-11-23/teens-and-tech https://dianerehm.org/shows/2016-11-23/teens-and-tech
• indescions_2017 9y ago
  Face-time can be magical. Especially around the holidays. When clusters of your tribe gather in geographically disperse points. But you can still experience a simulacrum of "presence". But author has a point about banks being particularly egregious offenders of phone dependency. They are progressing. With voice print and zelle. As well as iris scans. But I still need face to face in person meetings about once per month. And though face authenticated live full duplex video can serve as a proxy. Trust that is built from a personal connection may never be disrupted.
  • StudentStuff 9y ago
    I've essentially written Facetime off at this point, between firewall issues, hit and miss support among my contacts, and multiple frustrating attempts to use it with my mother, it just isn't worth it. Easier to throw her on Signal and use that, plus she can join the family group chat then.
• mirimir 9y ago
  I generally don't like being interrupted. But, paraphrasing Marv, I love spam callers. No matter what you do to them, you don't feel bad.
  • mirimir 9y ago
    It seems that I've offended a few people. Sorry. I ought to know better than making comments that are contentious, brief and joking. My point is that I'm getting old. And so I've become more sympathetic to issues around spam calls to older people. Who may be hard of hearing, slow to understand, and gullible. I suffer from none of that so far. But I can fake it, following the Eddie script. Basically, I give callers a chance to get that I'm old, and a little incoherent. If they back off, and apologize for bothering me, I thank them, and wish them the best of luck. But if they push, knowing that I'm old and apparently vulnerable, I segue into full Eddie. With no regrets.
• dcosson 9y ago
  It's odd that despite the author's hatred of phone calls, he doesn't do pretty basic things to avoid them. I've learned after a while that the first thing you should do when you set up any new account like a credit card, gym, health insurance, electric company, ISP, etc. is set up and link the online account to the real account. Yes it's super annoying that these are usually not the same thing, but once you know the routine it's not too complicated and you're way better off setting it up front. In addition to potentially avoiding phone calls in the future, this also makes it more likely you'll actually be informed if you owe them money or otherwise need to respond. Otherwise, they don't have to make any effort to contact you over any medium other than paper mail (and if you're lucky phone), and if you happen to not read it or not answer the call, or maybe you've moved addresses and the forwarding period has ended, they can just send your account to collections. Only then, once your credit is sufficiently ruined, will the collections agency actually put some effort into getting a hold of you. It's such a crazy system, there really needs to be some kind of national digital notification service to replace USPS for sending people legally binding notifications and bills.
• projektir 9y ago
  I recently had to spend a lot of time on the phone to set something important up. It was a very frustrating experience. I would call them, and be met with a robocall. The robocall would not really have a section for what I actually needed to do, so I would stumble around and often end up at the wrong person. Often we were both confused and it wasn't clear what was going on. Every time I called, it's a different person. I have to tell them my contact information and details every time. There's no continuity from previous discussions. Sometimes, the phone would cut out, for a reason I still haven't figured out. Often in the middle of me talking to someone, and since there's no continuity, all that time is now lost. I had different people tell me different things at the same phone number. I end up with no record of my conversations, so it's hard to go back later and say: "Hey, they told me to do X, but it didn't work". Holds, holds, holds. When I finally did a phone call that fixed everything, I spent about an hour and I was bounced between 5 different departments, including one case of being bounced in a cycle. Overall, I had to call this company about 5 times. I don't hate phones per se, I like talking to people on the phone if it's a productive conversation for both of us. But I absolutely hate the idea of figuring out something important or receiving a service via a phone.
  • 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
    At this point, I have to assume that it's deliberate at some level. There is so much low-hanging fruit for improving the customer experience that it's no longer plausible to me that most call centers have that as a genuine goal.
    • CaptSpify 9y ago
      I used to work as part of the helpdesk for a large company a few years ago. Calls that never made it to a live person were considered "solved by the phone-tree". Everyone there knew that 9/10 of those were people who just got too frustrated with the phone tree, hung up and tried to call back again. It's all about padding those reports.
  • icebraining 9y ago
    There's no excuse for lack of continuity nowadays, though. The callcenters I know have software to create tickets where the operators write the details of your request. Next time you just need to provide your client number or other ID to continue where you left of.
• combatentropy 9y ago
  This article is hilarious and well written. Despite it being about suffering a little too much pain over phone calls, I think it's also meant to be funny. Take for example his story about being too nervous to call his own doctor and eventually getting just better on his own, and therefore how he wonders if telephones are a tool used by the national health service to cut costs. I wonder how he would have survived in the days of only telephones and no text messages, or in the days of no telephones and only unexpected raps at the door. His indictment of telephone customer service is thorough. Even people who don't normally dread phone calls probably dread trying to call a company.
  • hrktb 9y ago
    I can’t speak for the author, but people going incredible length to avoid phone calls is a real thing. What surprises me is the author not having the online credentials handy. I also hate phone calls with a passion, and the first thing I look for in a bank is the online interface and how good their app is maintained. I had to give up on well regarded local banks because of how they focus on “human touch” and had sub-par online tools. Same with doctors, it took a lot of time to find a range of doctors that had online reservation systems but that’s definitely doable in europe at least. I survived the years where phoning people was the only way, but even then I tried to have alternatives (actually going to the company’s office was usually a lot better for instance). Basically I think telephone was a mistake, and wish it a painful and quick death so we forget about it yesterday.
  • grkvlt 9y ago
    > he wonders if telephones are a tool used by the national health service to cut costs that just lowered my opinion of him. first he mentions there is an online service, but for some reason he can't be bothered to obtain the user id required to use it. similarly with his bank, he can't use facebook messenger to communicate with them (and why on earth would he want to) and mentions their other digital banking services for online access, but again refuses to use them. the report of millions of people with 'telephone phobia' is misrepresenting things - there are not 4.5 million people with a mental condition that causes them fear and anxiety when confronted by a telephone, there are that many people who don't like phones, the same as there are that many people who don't like spiders. and the idea that the NHS might be trying to save money by providing a telephone service staffed 24/7 is just so ludicrous it's hard to know how to respond. the author obviously has mental health issues regarding social interactions, and should seek help for that issue rather than trying to replace the telephone.
• Feniks 9y ago
  Want to reach me? WhatsApp or a good old fashioned email. Your call be unanswered and I haven't listened to voicemail in years. Life is too short for inane babbling. I can read faster than the average person can talk.
  • simonbarker87 9y ago
    But the average person can’t type faster than they can talk. Generally a conversation has two sides and typing forces both sides to express themselves in a much slower manner, the time you save reading you will waste typing
    • Feniks 9y ago
      Typing forces people to think before they act. It is marvelous. Synchronous communication is overrated. A well written message of a few sentences can replace an hour of talking.
      • grkvlt 9y ago
        The 'well written' part of that is what many people seem to struggle with. It can sometimes take over an hour to produce just a paragraph or two containing a 'well written' message with the right style, optics, tone, and connotations, spending time checking the spelling, punctuation, grammar, and factual content for accuracy and readability. A hastily thrown together couple of sentences with spelling errors, unexplained abbreviations and acronyms, and perhaps even missing some important detail will cause more damage and waste more time than that hour long phone conversation.
    • wildrhythms 9y ago
      Good- this gives both parties the opportunity to boil down the information into the most important parts, and verify those important parts for accuracy.
• jingo_dingo 9y ago
  No way to contact the guy through his website? I had some thoughts to share with him but never mind. I'll call next time ;-)
• anotherevan 9y ago
  I’m probably a bit the other way in that I get frustrated with text messages going back and forth and back and forth when a one minute phone call will sort everything out far more efficiently. Probably also has something to do with hating tapping away at tiny virtual keyboard on the phone, too. My teenage daughter seems very reluctant to make a phone call. Watching her try and organise something with her friends drives me a bit spare as it involves hours of waiting for poorly worded, ambiguous messages on Facebook or texts, with me suggesting several times, “Why don’t you just call them, and get it all figured out right now?” On the other hand, watching my Dad buy a new mobile phone is really fun. The salesperson is trying to up-sell him on all the features of a phone, “You have unlimited texts, and it has an app to make you taller, and…” and my Dad just keeps asking, “Yeah, but can it make phone calls?” I guess I fall somewhere in between. I do find, when there is a scene in a TV show or movie where someone’s phone keeps ringing incessantly and they keep cancelling it while trying to have the deep and meaningful conversation with someone wanting to yell, “Don’t you know how to turn your phone off?!” I do hate voicemail. Not so much leaving them, but having to check them. Probably because I hate any “interactive” system that involves sentences like, “To hear a list of all the ways technology has improved your life, please press one…” Unsolicited calls to mobiles is not a big thing in Australia (yet) so I’m lucky there. On the home line, I have an old analogue modem to pick up caller ID information for incoming phone calls using NCID[1]. When a call comes in: * Automatically pauses the music player on my PC. * Looks up the number in my address book, and displays the information on my screen. Also sends to the two Kodi/OSMC servers, for people watching TV. This assumes it is not on my block-list. If it is on my block-list of known scammer and telemarketer numbers then it as automatically answered with a recording of the “This number has been disconnected…” message to try and trick them. [1] http://ncid.sourceforge.net/ http://ncid.sourceforge.net/
  • eitland 9y ago
    I love text. I don’t have to remember it or write it down - it's already written down. Also I have a feeling that a lot of the "have a meeting" guys are the same that will try to tell another version of what was said in the meeting. You aren’t sure even with text though - at some point I had an ex-colleague telling me what I had written, so I found the actual mail that proved my version. His answer: but that was not what you meant...
• pishpash 9y ago
  Spammer have hacked phones, after email, search results, and blog comments. If there were competition, somebody might have solved this problem!
• lifeformed 9y ago
  Getting a phone call always feels so rude. It's like it's saying, "Whatever you are doing, stop RIGHT NOW and listen to me. NOW! NOW! I'm giving you TEN SECONDS! LISTEN TO ME."
  • qznc 9y ago
    This! Phone calls are most impolite way to begin communication in my opinion. I'm probably not alone, because a lot of my acquaintances send a chat message first, like "hi, can I call you right now?". It can also lead to priority inversion. You handle the caller first despite having a higher priority (like a person next to you). Phone calls feel more urgent. Some people exploit this (e.g. salesmen). (I might have phone anxiety, but weaker than in the article, and this is just me rationalizing it?) A weaker variant of this are WhatsApp voice messages. You can delay listening to them, but you cannot skim to the relevant parts and must listen to the drivel before. "Hi ... uh ... sorry for this voice message ... uh ... but I'm too busy to type right know so I thought I'd rather talk ..." Am I the only one who finds this impolite and rude? Obviously this person does not value my time because I have to invest the time to listen. A text message would take a fraction of the time to read. Especially, because people would leave out the drivel. The waste of time multiplies if such voice messages go to group chats.
    • nicky0 9y ago
      Turn off vibrations, disable voicemail and set your phone to silent. That way you only get calls when you are looking at your phone. Missed calls go to your call register and you can call them back at a convenient time to your.
      • qznc 9y ago
        Yes, I often do this. Call register is missing the subject and even the name for unknown numbers.
  • simonbarker87 9y ago
    Just don’t answer, or, better yet, stick your phone on silent or do not disturb when you are busy. you’re projecting that emotion on to the caller, I see an incoming call as an indication that someone would like to speak to me, it a demand for attention. If I can’t take the call I won’t answer and will call them back (or email to arrange a more suitable time) when I can.
• taf2 9y ago
  Uh why allow anyone other than people on your contact list to even get anything other than a busy signal ... I do this on my home phone and mobile. If my phone rings it’s someone I know.
• ipsin 9y ago
  While I don't have a phone phobia, I do hate how much time it takes to get a simple piece of information. A recent example: I wanted to book a suite at a hotel. The hotel is not tall, and it overlooks a very noisy bar on one side. Is it possible to get a suite on the other side? Where will I be located, anyway? This information is not online. Instead I have to engage in a phone call. Spend some time on hold. Bounce between people who work in the hotel and a reservations desk a couple of time. Eventually I get the answer, and it's exactly what I want. But. I'm bothered in two directions. One, that the information is not at my fingertips. The other, that I find it irritating to have that actual conversation to get the information I want. I'd like to have a better handle on this mental impatience.
  • danieltillett 9y ago
    I think you might find this lack of information is a feature not a bug.
    • mwcampbell 9y ago
      What do you mean? A feature for whom? The customer, or the company trying to sell the service?
      • danieltillett 9y ago
        The hotel.
• yoodenvranx 9y ago
  > If I were rich, I would have a permanent secretary. If I ever play and win the lottery this is the one thing I would spent big money on. No expensive cars, no expensive wine, just a person which takes care of everything. Need a new insurance for the car? Tell the secretary to do it. Car is broken? Tell the secretary to take care of it. Need a hotel? Tell the personal secretary to book one. Phone broken? Just send an email "Please order me a Samsung S8" and it will magically appear the next day. Don't like it? Just tell them to send it back. This would solve 95% of my daily struggles and it would improve the quality of my life way more than any expensive yacht or car could ever do. In fact if you have a group of half a dozen people who each pay a few hundred $ a month you could almost employ one person who takes care of such stuff even as a not-so-rich person.
  • fossuser 9y ago
    I think that’s basically what this company does (though I haven’t used them): https://www.zirtual.com/plans-pricing https://www.zirtual.com/plans-pricing
    • giblfiz 9y ago
      In general this doesn't work out as well as you would hope. In many cases (financial, medical, legal) another person can't trivially act as your agent. (I.E. your secretary can't do it for you) I think the very wealthy handle this via specialists with specific licensing, but I personally had no luck going the virtual assistant route.
      • mbrameld 9y ago
        Is that true even with a power of attorney?
        • chipperyman573 9y ago
          Do you really want to grant an app power of attorney over you? That's like adding yourself as a co-signer of a loan. If they mess something up, it's your problem and "they should have know I didn't want that" isn't usually considered a valid reason to undo anything.
• paul7986 9y ago
  On my iPhone I use the AT&T Call Protect app and it works pretty well. Though I am still getting a few spam calls from phone numbers with my same exchange which go unanswered. I would think sooner or later the telemarketers are training the public/the masses that answering unknown calls isn’t worth it making it an unprofitable business. Just read all the comments here and on Facebook re: this... ppl just don’t answer the phone like they use to. For me If we haven’t spoken before text, email, FB or leave me a voice message and I’ll call you or actually answer your call.
• siliconc0w 9y ago
  Text messages have their own issues. I kinda like 'em for, 'what do you want at the store' type queries but there is this whole 'text game' flirting thing I think I'm supposed to learn how to do and can't really figure out. It feels like a 90s action movie with two people shooting back and forth at each other for 20 minutes to little effect. Highly edited perpetual conversations filled with weird iconography that, at this point, I pretty much choose at random. This is what being old feels like.
• mrtree 9y ago
  I agree with the author, but I’d rather not use facebook either.
• sp332 9y ago
  Part of this rant reminded me of a Ray Bradbury short story (5 pages) called The Murderer. http://www.sediment.uni-goettingen.de/staff/dunkl/zips/The-Murderer.pdf http://www.sediment.uni-goettingen.de/staff/dunkl/zips/The-M... [PDF]
• JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  I suspect a good fraction of my excess income is a product of enjoying in-person meetings and phone calls and working in tech. For certain classes of coördination and problems, voice is more efficient.
• noir_lord 9y ago
  I hate the phone because the lack of visual cues and the delay makes a conversation really hard, I find myself starting to talk too early/too late and I find it exhausting. I really hate the phone when someone rings me and spends 10 minutes getting to the point of the call which is something that could have been done in a text/email, wasn't urgent and largely is a yes/no thing. Also if you send and email and then ring 20 minutes later to see if I got the email a) I hate you b) I'll DND your extension (I read the manual for our phones at work - I think I am probably the only one who has). The only person who can actually make my work phone make a ringing noise is the boss, everyone else who isn't on the DND list just makes the display flash blue.
• ravenstine 9y ago
  I've been saying essentially the same thing for years. I'm glad people are catching on that the legacy phone system is a joke. Phone companies are also complicit in the international scams performed over their system. Good luck getting them to block repeat spam; they will usually suggest you install some 3rd party app on your phone before they even consider taking action. Even then, they usually won't take action. At one point I was getting dozens of spam calls every day. I thought I'd just whitelist the numbers I'd want to let contact me, but for some reason Android does not come with this feature. The problem with 3rd party apps is that you still receive a call, but it hangs up immediately, so you will still have a notification and sometimes a vibration if the app doesn't respond immediately. So I said to hell with it and I turned off all incoming calls. If people need to talk to me, they can leave a voicemail or text me beforehand.
  • wildrhythms 9y ago
    I do exactly the same. If I haven't agreed to a time in advance (and I usually haven't), then my phone notifications will be off. I can be reached any time of the day via text or email, but an unsolicited call is out of the question. When companies insist on only contacting me directly via the phone and expecting an immediate answer; yet forcing me into a labyrinth to talk to a stranger when I need to contact them: Why would I ever agree to this horrible one-way street?
• njarboe 9y ago
  Too bad I can't charge everyone a dollar (or five) who calls me unless they are on my white list. I think this would fix spam calls completely and still let unwhite listed people contact me.
• exabrial 9y ago
  Telephone is not secure, neither is the mail. And we send important stuff all the time through it.
• chx 9y ago
  1. Gethuman will handle a lot of these truly unpleasant phone calls. They are awesome. I had them call Telus, the cost was $30. Worth every cent. Took me several months to realize I am just unable to do this one. I ... just couldn't. 2. I never answer my calls. They go to voicemail. All of them. I do not even have incoming phone service in the first place; I have a data only plan and an Anveo subscription. I will call you back via VoIP if I choose to do so, at my convenience, at my desk, indeed armed with all the data I need to make a successful call.
• Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
  I used to had a phone phobia just as bad as described by the author, including spending nontrivial amounts of time going to places to ask a brief question to avoid a short phone call, etc. My phobia was cured when I got a girlfriend who liked talking on the phone, plus we were away from each other most of the week so it was a good idea to do so. So if talking on the phone gives you anxiety and you would rather not have it, talking to a loved one might be good therapy. However, I still hate phones (as in phone calls, not smartphones and their wondrous apps) for everything but personal communication with close friends or relatives. I hate how phones bluntly and suddenly interrupt anything you're doing, how you don't necessarily know who is calling, how you don't see the other person's face and how they require to answer now. When I was younger I seemed to be in a minority for hating phones, but we seem to grow more and more. I look forward to a world where we can conduct any business by email, text messages or, in the minority of cases where it's really needed, previously agreed Skype calls.
• libeclipse 9y ago
  Lmfao man needs a shrink.
  • sctb 9y ago
    You've been posting a lot of unsubstantive comments. Could you please stop and follow the guidelines instead? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • libeclipse 9y ago
      Allow yourself and your pretentious shit.
      • sctb 9y ago
        I don't understand.
• xefer 9y ago
  My changed relationship with the telephone became weirdly apparent when I watched the original WarGames movie recently. There's a scene where David (Matthew Broderick) is alone with McKittrick (Dabney Coleman) in his office being interrogated separated by an office desk. While they're sitting there the telephone on McKittrick's desk starts ringing, which he silently ignores keeping his eyes glued on David, who grows increasingly uncomfortable as the phone keeps ringing and going unanswered. I recall when that movie first came out there was a terrible tension in the air because nobody ignored a phone back then. Leaving it to just ring away felt wrong and unacceptable. Now whenever a phone rings I mostly just go "ugh" and feel no obligation to get to it at all. As I watched that scene again I felt nothing of that original tension. I wonder how that scene would effect younger people today watching it for the first time?
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • OisinMoran 9y ago
    I came into existence quite a bit after that film did, but I just watched it for the first time two weeks ago and the phone going unanswered definitely made me quite uncomfortable. Excellent film.
  • DanBC 9y ago
    The 5:4 timing of the ring in the UK was designed to create tension and a sense of urgency to make people answer it quicker.
    • acobster 9y ago
      5:4 as in the time signature? Very cool, I had no idea (not from UK).
  • pasquinelli 9y ago
    part of the difference is now a phone belongs to a person, whereas then it belonged to a house, or in the case of the scene you're talking about, an office. i can keep track of who matters and when to expect a call if all i have to think about is myself, but even with just a couple people living with me i can't just ignore a phone call. i don't know if one of the people i live with is expecting a call. and with phones tied to places instead of people, you get calls like, "have you heard from so and so?", or "is my kid at your place?", which would be really shitty for me to just ignore.
• viraptor 9y ago
  > If I were rich, I would have a permanent secretary. All calls first reach the secretary. The secretary would arrange the conversation for a date and time that suits my calendar. I'd be surprised if there isn't a twillio-based system for this already...
• SwellJoe 9y ago
  I ran a business for several years that never quite grew large enough to support additional technical staff, so I was always on call. It didn't happen often, but I got enough calls (or pages, since that was how I dealt with it in early couple of years) in the middle of the night to where I literally had nightmares about a phone ringing for a while. Even today sometimes my stomach hurts and I feel angry when the phone rings. I've never liked the phone, but I really hate it these days when there are so many better ways to communicate.
  • gameshot911 9y ago
    I have an after-hours pager about once a year or so, and each time I get the same sense of low-grade trepidation at night. Sleep quality also suffers tremendously, I'm always wide awake at the lightest disturbance. It's terrible, and I always feel for anyone who has to be on call at night with regularity.
  • mv4 9y ago
    Was on call 24x7 for several years, took me 10 years to recover. I still hate getting called with no prior warning, can't help it. It messes you up.
• xg15 9y ago
  > I hate telephones. > The problem is the medium. The problem is synchronous communication. The problem is the telephone. I hate telephones. > I’m told that, in 1993, 2.5 million people in the UK had “telephone phobia”. That’s over 4%, similar to rates of arachnophobia. This is not unusual, and I’d bet rates are higher now. Everyone hates telephones. > ...Asynchronous textual communication is how everyone communicates remotely now. It’s here to stay. Killing the telephone is a big market. I don't hate telephones. I do however hate the implied (and quite arrogant) call to action in that post "I hate telephones and like chat, so we all should get rid of them and exclusively communicate via chat"
  • robryan 9y ago
    Lots of companies have live chat already, often there are certain things they won’t let you do on live chat because of the perception that it is less secure. Big companies seem even less like likely to have an email address where you can get service. The companies can keep their phone line. It’s just better for customers and likely cheaper for them to provide other options.
  • opcenter 9y ago
    I think the problem is that there's a perception that a phone call is an interrupt event. Because you have a person on the phone waiting for you to answer, you have to (or should) answer the call. So, if the matter is important then a phone call is completely appropriate. But if it's just a call to say "hey, how's it going?" then perhaps a text message or email is a better choice with a "let me know when it's a good time to call" added in so you can have a normal voice conversation without either party being interrupted.
  • matt4077 9y ago
    I love how you are admittedly making something up the article doesn’t say (“implied”), and then proceed to call it “arrogant”.
  • iiv 9y ago
    I agree with the sentiment of his article, but I also agree with you. The article is written in a condescending and arrogant way.
• hartator 9y ago
  I definitely can relate. I still don't get why people would prefer phone over texts or emails. The main thing I miss is a copy and paste!
• therealmarv 9y ago
  Mailbox? Turn it on for everything without waiting. Async done.
• thomk 9y ago
  My favorite is this call from an unknown caller. /ring Me: Hello. Caller: Hello, is this <my name> Me: Who is this? Caller: IS THIS <my name>? Me: Who is this? Caller: Sir, I can not give you any information until you identify yourself. Me: Hahah. /click Don't call me and make demands. Seriously. If you aren't willing to tell me why you just called this number, I'm not even going to verify I'm a person let alone identify myself.
  • Strom 9y ago
    I frequently experience a variant of this where they don't even know who I am. Me: Hello! Caller: Am I talking to an individual or a company? Me: You should know who you're calling. My answer really throws a wrench into their flowchart, they don't even know which product/service to try to sell me.
  • grkvlt 9y ago
    What's interesting here is how things are different from say 20-30 years ago, when everyone would answer their land-line with 'Hello, this is NAME on NUMBER, can I help you' or some variant. This is how I was taught to answer the phone at home, certainly. Perhaps what's changed is that calls are no longer expensive, and numbers are no longer hand-dialled, so knowing as quickly as possible that you had connected to the wrong number or person is not as important. There's probably other cultural issues at work, I guess, to do with an increased awareness of privacy and so on. The way we communicate has certainly been changed by the Internet and mobile phones in an enormous way.
• Bromskloss 9y ago
  It seems to me that he never really gets to the point of why he is afraid of telephones (even making calls, apparently).
• wruza 9y ago
  I noticed that people of my age (30+) who don’t take unknown calls usually feel inner insecurities that influence (or cause) their unhappy lives. It may be debt, unmet responsibilities, fear of being abused, etc. I can remember the time when landlines were new and everyone was excited to take a call and to speak to someone who’s not even around. The story also reminds me an old joke/anecdote. English gentlemen club, a gentleman naps in a chair near the fireplace. His boots are almost on fire. One man notices that, but the club etiquette disallows one to speak to the person he doesn’t know. After looking for pretty long he finally finds someone who at least knows the name of that gentleman and is able to speak to him. They wake him up and after a greeting the gentleman who knows him says: “Dear Sir, it is rainy weather today, and this fireplace is conveniently hot. By the way, I’m sad to tell you that your left boot is already burned down.” I think that author puts too many gentle ceremony into just a short call.
  • matt4077 9y ago
    I believe there’s a “churning” where a medium is first abandoned for the most informal, and usually pleasant, conversation, leaving the old medium only for the unp,easentries of life, such as bills or death notices.
  • pfranz 9y ago
    I think what landlines were used for when they were first rolled out are very different from what cellphones are used for today. Snail mail, for me today is almost exclusively junk mail. I still have occasional formal notices from my bank or companies I do business with and a few times a year a seasonal card from family. I bet my attitude towards mail differs from people's attitudes 50 years ago. I think the same goes for telephone calls.
• unsignedint 9y ago
  I have a virtual secretary that came with the phone service. It called voice mail. I don't take unknown calls these days unless I expect them. If they are serious talking to me, they will leave a message. I will simply call them back as needed. Occasions I took unknown calls were all scams, and these days, it just won't worth the hassle of dealing with them. What frustrate me the most is when I call them back, it's not a direct line, and/or when the person doesn't answer yet their voice mail is not activated so I can't leave a message.
  • wildrhythms 9y ago
    I do the same; If someone wants to talk on the phone they'll need to text or email beforehand and we'll both agree on a time. My voicemails are automatically transcribed. Why do companies expect a direct line to me, but no direct line back to them? Why is this a one way street? This is easily solved by letting customers arrange an appointment to call or be called.
• walshemj 9y ago
  Anyone exhibiting Mr Fishers phobia needs to consider seeing a therapist - Its going to cause them major problems at work and socially. I have noticed a reluctance to use the goddammed phone as intended - rather than call me to discus something important and time sensitive people will just add a task to base camp in a some what passive aggressive way
  • wildrhythms 9y ago
    I have no social anxiety or fear of public speaking or anything of the sort (I studied theatre for years and now I do improv in my free time). I have no problems at work; I like to think I have no problems socially. Yet I also hate telephones for all of the reasons that the author listed. Part of a past job involved helping customers over the phone. Calls are interruptive, unreliable, and inefficient. Repeating names, addresses, numbers, or relying on customers to accurately describe something. There is no real authentication. Maybe it's a good medium for people who have trouble writing/typing effectively. My friends do not use the telephone either. We agree where/when via text or email.
• RantyDave 9y ago
  I've had exactly one spam call ... no, I lie, two but from the same company. GoDaddy.
• astura 9y ago
  I literally will patronize business that cost a little more just because they let me schedule online. For me, I'll give an example - chimney sweep. The company I use lets me request a service appointment online and lists it's prices online. The rest I saw I had to call for both prices and appointments. No, thanks.
  • wildrhythms 9y ago
    Calling for prices... outside of very special circumstances, no thank you! "If you have to ask for the price, then you can't afford it." Well, I probably can afford it, but if I have to ask for the price then the business is asking more from me than I am of them. I'll go with whatever competitor doesn't seem to be actively hiding something from me, thanks.
• bbanyc 9y ago
  Cake had it right almost 15 years ago: https://youtu.be/QT1wOS1v97I https://youtu.be/QT1wOS1v97I
• dpc_pw 9y ago
  I have a Google Voice number, and phone set to ring only for people on a whitelist. So I pick the phone only from family and friends and calls that I expected. Everybody else gets to leave a voice message. I get a transcription on email and call back if it's worth it. If they don't leave a voice message, that means it wasn't important.
• Sidnicious 9y ago
  After reading this, I just started experimentally sending all calls to voicemail. Here's how I set it up; it should work with GSM phone carriers: - Dial the below number. It'll show a bunch of information, including your voicemail number. Remember/copy the number. *#67# - Create a new contact. I put "Phone Off" in the company name field. Use the below number as its phone number, replacing the "X"s with the number from the first step, including country code. Calling this contact will tell the network to forward all calls to voicemail without the phone ringing. *21*+XXXXXXXXXXX# - Create another new contact. I put "Phone On" in the company name field. Enter the phone number below. Calling it will cancel call forwarding. ##21# I added both of these contacts to my favorites and can tap them to enable/disable calls. Right now, I'm only planning to turn off forwarding when I'm actively expecting a call. It turns out that my phone puts an indicator in the status bar when forwarding is turned on, which is cool. Let's see how it goes.
  • matthberg 9y ago
    Awesome, and I bet with pinning of contacts to home screen this could easily be used without ever touching the phone app. Also would be cool to use tasker to increase integration with multiple triggers or timeouts.
• Nimitz14 9y ago
  Grow up.
• dingo_bat 9y ago
  Maybe this is an individual thing but I'd rather talk on the phone for any important conversation. For example, if I need to contact my bank for something, I'm always going to choose a phone call over chat. A phone call with a follow-up email if needed.
  • wildrhythms 9y ago
    What makes the audio medium more 'important' to you? If 1:1 is important, what if you were provided the direct email address of a representative at the company? What are you able to convey over the phone that you can't directly via some other method?
    • dingo_bat 9y ago
      I think the instant feedback is the most important thing for me. If I want to convey something that is a bit important for me, I need to get it done and move on to something else. I can tick off that item in my mental checklist immediately. With an email or chat, there is a delay. And there is no guarantee of feedback. I need to switch to another task knowing that this one isn't done yet.
      • wildrhythms 9y ago
        I can understand this for some things; for others, the phone is an interface to an email. Can you give an example? "We'll send a service technician to you as soon as we can!" -> Effectively an email/form that I myself could have sent "I updated your account with this new information." -> Effectively an email/form that I myself could have sent "What does the error message say?" -> Better conveyed through email/chat If you feel like your requests are being ignored over non-phone mediums, then that sounds like a failure of the organization and not email/text/chat as a medium, at least that's how I see it.
• krick 9y ago
  Seems like unjust complaining about the phenomena, when the technology is actually to blame. I do dislike phones myself, but have accepted the status quo of obligatory having one and answering the calls. But it seems unacceptably stupid how hard it is in Android to configure what seems to me like the most basic features of the dialer. One would think that built-in answering machine, completely transparent phone number blacklist/whitelist configuration (including time of the day, CID, "mode" and appropriate action — reject w/ or w/o notifying me, silently ignore, answer automatically, answer manually, etc.) is a must have. But call handling (on par with a contact list and other "mandatory" apps) is about the lamest software on my smart"phone". Why the hell this device has a browser built-in, but cannot handle incoming/outgoing calls properly?!
• rsync 9y ago
  This seems off-topic but I have a suspicion a lot of people in this thread will find the twiml for "ring forever" to be useful and interesting: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <Response> <Pause length="600"/> <Hangup /> </Response> (that will ring for 10 minutes before hanging up) I think this will be interesting because there is probably a lot of overlap between people critical of phones and people critical of voicemail ... but it's actually sort of difficult to have a phone without voicemail. If you disable voicemail with your carrier, it doesn't work the way you think (hope) it will. When you fail to answer, the carrier gives some weird message about the subscriber being unavailable which just makes people think you don't pay your phonebill or something. In short, you cannot, from the standpoint of your carrier, just have no response other than ringing. But with twilio you can ...
• dheera 9y ago
  I hate not just telephones, but being funneled into this whole culture of being disturbed, and disturbing people anywhere, anytime, at will, for things that can wait. As both an introvert and a technical person I do almost everything I do with deep concentration, whether that be coding, playing piano, reading papers, biking, driving, or hiking. A single phone ring, a single "hey what's up", while I'm in the middle of coding causes a cataclysmic implosion of an immensely complicated thought structure that takes a several minutes to rebuild. A single phone ring while I'm biking or driving is honestly dangerous. A single phone ring while I'm playing the piano and not only will I lose track of what I'm trying to learn, but I will also not be in a state of mind to speak a human language, and will probably answer the phone call with gibberish. Hence, my phone is in airplane mode a lot of the time. The rest of the time I have a call blocker on that only accepts calls from a few known numbers. The only time I turn off the call blocker is if someone has pre-arranged a phone call with me and it's on my calendar. I also highly value social time and try to give 100% undivided attention during them. I loathe people who look at their phones while I'm trying to talk to them, and people who ask me to go to dinner with them and then go on a phone call for 50% of the dinner. It makes me feel unimportant, makes me feel like I wasted my time trekking out to meet them. I don't want to do the same thing to other people. I realize that not everyone is like that. But I get the worst end of the stick when people think they can just call me "sometime in the afternoon". Realistically that means I will get NOTHING done that entire afternoon except wait for your damn phone call because I need to deal with your inability to schedule a time and respect my time. I honestly miss the days when cell phones had not yet been invented. I miss the days when people would just set a time and place, meet, talk, leave, and get on with business according to a plan. I do, however, love the ability to access the internet from anywhere for maps, bus/train times, news, and other information, when I want it. Oh, another reason I hate calls and typically shut my phone off is because it's increasingly difficult to do so in privacy. I spend a lot of time outdoors, on public transit, and so on, and the last thing I need is a bunch of bystanders staring and eavesdropping on my calls, and even commenting on what I'm speaking. I also don't like it when contexts mix, e.g. friends from different circles hear conversations of mine from another circle. It results in me going into a shock state where I basically cannot talk. It happens so often that I just stopped using voice calls altogether, for the most part.
  • 9y ago
• daxfohl 9y ago
  Supposedly it's tied to Meyers-Briggs INFP personality type.
• code_duck 9y ago
  I don't like to answer unexpected calls from anyone. It was different when the phone was the only instant communication medium... one hd more time to prepare for the content of a given call. Now, it is always a distraction... my girlfriend frequently calls without warning in the middle of a text conversation, and i often don't answer because i'm not ready. It takes a far greater level of attention and commitment to talk on the phone than to participate in a text based conversation.
  • nicky0 9y ago
    I think you have it right. No obligation to answer a call. Not answering just means that it's not a good time. Sadly a lot of people seem to think it is rude.
• djhworld 9y ago
  I wonder if it's an introvert/extrovert thing. You see typically extroverted people having no problems with being on the phone all the time, probably because they call equally extroverted people who do the same. Look at sales people, or people who have to work with other people a lot, they approach the phone as a tool for getting what they want and quickly. My solution, as an introvert, is to never answer calls from people who are not my family. I have a twillio service setup that manages my voicemail and sends me an SMS message of the transcription, that way I can review the content and purpose of the call and decide what to do next (although I don't think Twilio's voice transcription service can accurately decipher British accents that well so you do end up with some hilarious results) 99% of time it's either recruiters who've managed to scalp my number from somewhere, or the odd spam caller.
• unlmtd1 9y ago
  Matrix.org
• partycoder 9y ago
  I blocked inbound international calls and since then no more spam calls.
• djhworld 9y ago
  Making phone calls "unnannounced" has always been a struggle of mine, mainly because I start to think "am I bothering them?" and then negative thoughts start to flood in. I do have anxiety issues which I go to therapy for, but I'd put making phonecalls lower down the priority list of things to tackle because it's not that important to me in the grand scheme of things. Completely irrational, I know, but that's where I'm at. Usually if I want to make a phonecall I arrange it with the person for a set time that suits both parties.
• zkomp 9y ago
  Yes: +1 to this. I'm probably one of those 4%. But this "phobia" might just initially be a slight negative feeling of not knowing who or what it is. But it is enough to tip the balance since the majority of calls you get are spam or otherwise unsolicited crap, and the few real calls actually meant for you arn't positive either - then it becomes a learned fear that reinforces itself every time. I would never call if there is another way using text or other medium, I will not answer if it is not known or there is a good probability I know what it is. If I really have to make a call, that entails preparations and lots of wasted energy (it is wasted since would write it down, and then I could just send it as text and it would be easy to read and understand...) Sure I can and do use Truecaller, and other ways to block spam or unwanted calls, and It really does work. I still hate the phone though.
• koiz 9y ago
  Imagine if every person in the world had the ability, at their arbitrary whim, to anonymously activate your fire alarm inside your home. That is the reality of the instant message. There is nothing quite as rude as the new message chime.
• b0rsuk 9y ago
  '''Text and email are polite invitations to a conversation. They happen at the speed and leisure of both the sender and the receiver. In stark contrast, when you get a phone call, it’s almost always a convenient time for the caller and a bad time for the recipient, who I refer to as the “victim” because I insist on accuracy. My philosophy is that every phone conversation has a loser.''' -- Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert comic strip http://blog.dilbert.com/2010/09/03/phone/ http://blog.dilbert.com/2010/09/03/phone/
• tareqak 9y ago
  I've had really good luck with following the instructions here: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolicited-mail-phone-calls-and-email https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolici... . I've registered for do not call, and opted out for pre-screened offers of credit permanently. I only recently learned about https://dmachoice.thedma.org/register.php https://dmachoice.thedma.org/register.php for physically mailed spam, and I'm getting around to it. I know it's all YMMV, but the number of spam phone calls that I receive has dropped to zero (not exaggerating here). There used to be one annoying travel/timeshare caller, but I reported them to the FTC two or three times, and that took care of it. I personally believe that it's fairly easy because of the time and date information that your phone's dialer/phone app records, but it could be easier with a bespoke FTC "donotcall" app. I'd rather involve the FTC in this sort of thing because it is part of their mandate, and benefits that they bring get propagated to all phone users (Android/iPhone/Windows Phone/feature phones/landlines).
• dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
  In the past I had a neutral attitude towards telephones. Until one day I realized I receive quite too many and started checking - how many of them are really useful to me. How often someone calls to give me something, and how often they want something from me. It turned out almost in 100% cases the calls were from people who wanted something from me. And of course they wanted a synchronous reply I couldn't or sometimes didn't want to give. So I decided to block all calls instead of one number (from my second half - in this case it doesn't matter if she wants to give or take, I'm still fine with all her calls). And you know what? Most friends quickly learned to respect it. They know they can always communicate to me via e-mail and I'll happily call them back or meet or whatever is needed. I use my phone mainly as a minicomputer with an additional function of communicating with the person I choose. And for these rare cases when I actually need to wait for an important phone call (this happens once a year maybe) I use an old throwaway phone with a prepaid SIM card. I only switch it on for as long as it's needed.
• sdfjkl 9y ago
  > I unplugged my landline phone. I have only plugged it back in once, and briefly, when debugging my internet connection, to check whether the line had a dial tone. That's generally the only thing landline phones are good for anymore. When I lived in the UK I was with the nerdiest ISP there (AAISP) and they offer a "broadband only" landline, that carries your DSL and a basic diagnostic service including a dialtone (mostly to prevent wayward OpenReach engineers from misdiagnosing your copper pair as "unused"), but no real phone calls. Suited me fine.
• DoubleGlazing 9y ago
  I get this totally. I don't like calling, not because of any anxiety, but because I don't know what awaits me. When I call a company I feel like although I am initiating the contact, they will take control of the call. And as for receiving I remember someone mentioning that a ringing phone is essentially someone saying "Speak to me now, speak to me now, speak to me now". It is an inherently rude form of communication because it demands instant attention with no regard to what you may be doing. I just don't answer calls these days unless they are from family. I was getting a lot of sales calls from my electricity provider who also wanted to sell me gas. We don't have gas at our home, but they wouldn't log that fact. So I blocked their number. Last week I got an email from them saying that they had been trying to call me for some time to let me know about an amazing offer, and that they think I may have accidentally blocked their number. Of course, they couldn't just put the details of the offer in the email. I had to call them.
• mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
  I just get a fresh number and don't tell anyone about it. Every unwelcome call goes straight to voicemail.
• Zigurd 9y ago
  For about $300/mo you can have a personal assistant who will do what he wants to have done with phone calls. But, for free, you can have Google Voice, which you should get anyway if you travel internationally or use Hangouts, which will block spam calls and screen calls from numbers not in your known contacts. If he works with a group of people in a consultancy, there are numerous small business pbx-aaS services that have auto-attendant features for call screening or that can be used in combination with a human personal assistant.
• quickoats 9y ago
  now i have the courage to write a blog post about how i dont like toasters and have nightmares about them and how they chase me around corners and assault me in my sleep, to see how many comments it can gather. let's keep discussing this important one first though.
• punnerud 9y ago
  Studied in Boston and loved coming back to Norway, no more phone spam! Log on to a central governmental service, with your 2-auth, opt out your phone-number and mail-address (the paper one) and then you don’t get more spam after 2-3weeks. It takes some time for everyone to update. Why are are there not something similar in the US?
• chriswarbo 9y ago
  Other than the NHS conspiracy theory and the desire to hand even more power over to facebook, I completely understand where the author's coming from. Especially not knowing who'll be on the other end (caller ID only identifies the number, not the person); and trying to anticipate and gather all necessary details to hand before embarking, due to being tethered to the wall/desk. I've spent a while thinking about this over the years. I think a much better form of interaction is the landline answering machine: the caller will be heard for a few seconds ("Hi it's Bob, are you there?"), the recipient can decide whether to answer, and if not then the caller doesn't know if they were available or not. Contrast that with current BS like "it disconnected after one ring, so I know you hit cancel". A similar mode of interaction is that of the walkie talkie, although that doesn't give the option of leaving a message.
• nerdponx 9y ago
  Everyone complains about companies’ customer service being terrible. But the companies are not the real problem here. The problem is the medium. The problem is synchronous communication. The problem is the telephone. I hate telephones. What? No. Once upon a time, a business department could take a message and return it later. You know, exactly like what you would do with email. Asynchronously.
• makecheck 9y ago
  Phone calls are like the most obnoxious possible pop-up web ad, taking over your entire display and demanding immediate attention, while being the thing you least care about at that instant. They manage to be worse than ads, too: at least with an ad you’re doing something explicit when the ad appears (like clicking a link); a phone call can literally interrupt you in the middle of typing, and HIDE everything you’re doing! Bonus points if you were about to tap on something and end up tapping one of the buttons on your pop-up phone call instead. I can’t believe we’re at version 11 of iOS when people needed a backgrounded/tiny phone UI since about iOS 2.