It’s not easy to explain. I have to talk to someone. Maybe it’s someone I know, someone I talk to every week at church, but… this is by phone. It’s different. I

It’s not easy to explain. I have to talk to someone. Maybe it’s someone I know, someone I talk to every week at church, but… this is by phone. It’s different. I know I have to make a phone call today or tomorrow, but I know I can’t ring now because he’ll be out on the farm, and if I ring now I’ll probably interrupt their evening meal or their family Bible readings, and now it’s too late, and now he might be at work, and… oh. I was supposed to call him the day before yesterday. Oops. I want to drop my car off for a service in Ballarat when I head down to Melbourne later this week, but that takes ringing them to make a booking. I should have done this in the middle of last week, when I planned to go down. All it takes is ringing their number, saying “can I book my car in for a service, drop off on the 13ᵗʰ or 14ᵗʰ, collection on the 15ᵗʰ”. For some reason that I can’t express, I haven’t made that phone call, and it’s probably too late now. I guess that DPF light will just continue flashing for a while longer. I could go on and on. It’s quite ridiculous how much trouble I have caused myself (and others, sometimes) just because I don’t like making phone calls. I’ve delayed things that would benefit me for years in a couple of cases. Receiving phone calls isn’t my favourite, either. I’m not crash hot with email or letters either, but phones and text messages are significantly worse. Phone call quality used to be fairly terrible, and I think that helped make it more of an ordeal too. That excuse is mostly gone now. If you don’t mind, or like, phones, you might be surprised just how many people are quite averse to making phone calls, some to the point of hating it with the passion of perhaps not a thousand suns, but at least a brown dwarf or two. Five or six of my seven siblings are in much the same boat as me, and my parents don’t like phones either. A couple of my siblings, and multiple other people I’ve talked with, find they more or less forget what they were going to talk about as soon as the call connects, and so it becomes an ordeal where they have to write a detailed list of what they want to talk about before dialing, or else their mind is just blank. But there is yet hope for me: I’m setting myself up as the local IT guy in my rural area, in significant part to force myself to deal with people more. Computers are easy, they do what I tell them to do, and I’m even pretty good at telling them the right thing to do; but people are what actually matter in life. I’m waiting for the return of Jesus and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth, and I don’t think we’ll need software then. Well, a bloke rang me yesterday, I answered, and today I did my first job, and even got paid straight away.