6 ms·

I just don't answer any calls if I don't recognize the number (and even sometimes if I do). Leave me a message, or better yet, text or email me like a normal hu

I just don't answer any calls if I don't recognize the number (and even sometimes if I do). Leave me a message, or better yet, text or email me like a normal human. I've yet to change my outgoing voicemail to say that but I'm very tempted. The problem for me is the asymmetry: Someone interrupts whatever I'm doing with an unrelated random topic and wants me to make a decision or answer questions, with basically no time to switch contexts or think. This is infuriating to me. At least with work, friends and family, for the last several years I've not even really used the "phone". All my calls are either scheduled conference calls, or adhoc calls initiated after a text/chat message. It's just contractors, dentists, daycare, stores etc that still use the phone primarily. Hopefully they'll all join the 2010's within the next decade or two.

inciampati 4y ago
We evolved in a world of social distraction. Now our mental life is so fragile that it can be disrupted into anger by a spontaneous interaction. Yet the information systems we live in are also designed to continuously distract the hell out of us. If you need to focus, turn off your phone, lock your door, and do not go online to read and post. Otherwise come join your fellow human animals in the beautiful dance of communication that gives us our superpowers!
- bearmode 4y ago
  Communication is great, but asynchronous communication is far better than synchronous. Problems it solves: - Not having something to hand, or having to look something up: I can take my time and find it, then email/text back - Being interrupted: I'll get back to you once I'm free - Dealing with business hours: I can email at 10pm and you can get back to me when you're in work the next day - Not having a record of communication: I can have an unbroken chain of communication the entire way through that we can both refer back to The only real negative is less immediacy, but things are rarely needed right now. If we kept phone calls to only things that were necessary right then and there, we'd hardly ever get them.
  - heleninboodler 4y ago
    There are advantages to synchronous, however. Stuff you don't necessarily need to know right now, but if you can't take care of it in realtime, you wouldn't bother with async. Say, I'm at the store and I want to know if my girlfriend needs [some product I'm staring at], and I want to know right away, because I'm about to leave, but if she's unavailable, it's no big deal. I'll try to call her and if she doesn't pick up, I just skip it. I'm not going to do an async query and then stand around for some undetermined amount of time to decide whether she's going to respond. It's synchronous or bail. That doesn't imply that it's needed now.
    - bearmode 4y ago
      I'm not talking just life-or-death stuff, I would be calling that something that you need to know right there. There's a very set, short timeframe for you to receive this information before it can no longer be acted upon. So of course a phone call makes more sense there.
    - yoav 4y ago
      Going to a store spontaneously and the other person spontaneously needing something from that store but not going themself sounds wild and unhinged to me. Save everyone the hassle and just don’t call. If she needed something she can just get it when she originally planned to. The unplanned phone call out of the blue can be 100% avoided
      - heleninboodler 4y ago
        "Hey, you mentioned you needed mushrooms for dinner. Did you get them yet? I'm at the store and could grab them right now and save you a trip," sounds "unhinged" to you? WTF.
        tarboreus 4y ago
        I must be really unhinged. Wonder if this person is married?
- msh 4y ago
  A problem with phone calls is that they interrupt no matter what. The person calling have no idea if they are interrupting. If I am in my home with family or in the office with colleagues they can look at me and check if I look busy/occupied and then decide if they want to interrupt me.
  - heleninboodler 4y ago
    > The person calling have no idea if they are interrupting Nor should they care. This is in your control, exactly as it should be: turn the ringer off.
    - em-bee 4y ago
      that's what i do. the problem is there is never a good time when an unexpected interruption is ok, unless it's my wife or my kids. so my phone is silent all the time. if a phonecall comes in when i am busy most often i don't even notice it. if i recognize the number i'll call back later. contrary to what others say, calls from friends are usually ok, what bothers me most is spam calls. because not only do i get interrupted, but i get nothing positive from the call either. it's just wasted. with a call from friends at least we end up having a useful conversation which makes up for any lost time.
    - gregmac 4y ago
      If they do the same thing, now it takes potentiality days of "phone tag" before you happen to find a time you're both free. With async comms, you initially go back and forth over text/chat/email/whatever. Sometimes resolving in minutes/hours. If you both decide it'd be faster to chat synchronously, you schedule a call and do that. Honestly, that fact async comms exist makes it kind of presumptuous to assume you can make someones device ring at anytime and just get their immediate and full attention. I feel that way both as a caller and callee. There's obviously exceptions, such as immediate family: but we roughly know what each other are doing, and the context. If my wife actually phones me, I will drop whatever I'm doing because it's guaranteed to be more important.
disruptiveink 4y ago
This is a surprisingly popular take, so I'm curious. If texting didn't exist and everyone you talk with had to switch to talking over the phone, how many people would you have to answer per day? This is assuming everyone would turn a text conversation into a call, which obviously is the worst case and wouldn't happen. Everyone with "text message anxiety" I know acts like they have 20 friends blasting on their phone every day, sucking up all of their precious Netflix time, yet I look at their Whatsapp and it's two unread messages from yesterday at best (DMs, of course – undirected group chat messages obviously don't count, groups can be muted and no one expects a reply on those unless they're tagged or it's a general question to arrange something, which is rare).
- jasode 4y ago
  >If texting didn't exist and everyone you talk with had to switch to talking over the phone, how many people would you have to answer per day? I understand the purpose of your question but it's not constructive to the discussion because you've framed it in terms of not having technical choices to get the response you want. Therefore, the obvious outcome is that people have to have a non-zero amount of answering the phone. Putting constraints on technology (no texting) in a hypothetical question to force people into tautological answers (aha, so you were able to respond to voice calls without bleeding to death which means your feelings are illogical.) Same idea as interrogating people who don't like boats and ships with "gotcha!" style questions: "But what if airplanes didn't exist and you needed to cross the ocean?" -- Obviously, you'd have unhappy travelers that forced themselves to use ships that didn't want to. People do what they have to do which overrides unpleasant actions. But the discussion isn't about what people _had_ to do. It's about _preferences_. The blog author eventually called Barclay's bank but he really didn't _want_ to. A lot of people including many old people before Generation X don't like answering phones. My previous comment about learning that lesson: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008851
  - disruptiveink 4y ago
    Not exactly. You are correct I was being slightly duplicitous, but the point I was trying to make is the claims of being "flooded" by personal requests for conversation are, in my experience, almost entirely overblown – note that I'm talking personal here, not business/work related. The objections to having conversations with friends always seem to boil down to "I need to focus" and "too many interruptions". When you're an IC being constantly interrupted by meetings, I agree. But to apply the same logic to personal acquaintances and friends? Anecdotally, people who claim they have no time for talking on the phone will have approximately 2-3 friends they talk on a regular (not even daily) basis and spend afternoons binging TV shows. Framing it as a "so much context switching required!" is what's really intellectually dishonest here. Perhaps there's something that is making people anxious or annoyed of talking synchronously with friends over the phone. Sure. But to transpose the work argument doesn't hold water. Also, once again, anecdotally (but I'd love to see studies about this), people who claim they "only operate well asynchronously" will Never. Ever. Reply to text/email.

inciampati 4y ago

We evolved in a world of social distraction. Now our mental life is so fragile that it can be disrupted into anger by a spontaneous interaction. Yet the information systems we live in are also designed to continuously distract the hell out of us. If you need to focus, turn off your phone, lock your door, and do not go online to read and post. Otherwise come join your fellow human animals in the beautiful dance of communication that gives us our superpowers!

bearmode 4y ago
Communication is great, but asynchronous communication is far better than synchronous. Problems it solves: - Not having something to hand, or having to look something up: I can take my time and find it, then email/text back - Being interrupted: I'll get back to you once I'm free - Dealing with business hours: I can email at 10pm and you can get back to me when you're in work the next day - Not having a record of communication: I can have an unbroken chain of communication the entire way through that we can both refer back to The only real negative is less immediacy, but things are rarely needed right now. If we kept phone calls to only things that were necessary right then and there, we'd hardly ever get them.
- heleninboodler 4y ago
  There are advantages to synchronous, however. Stuff you don't necessarily need to know right now, but if you can't take care of it in realtime, you wouldn't bother with async. Say, I'm at the store and I want to know if my girlfriend needs [some product I'm staring at], and I want to know right away, because I'm about to leave, but if she's unavailable, it's no big deal. I'll try to call her and if she doesn't pick up, I just skip it. I'm not going to do an async query and then stand around for some undetermined amount of time to decide whether she's going to respond. It's synchronous or bail. That doesn't imply that it's needed now.
  - bearmode 4y ago
    I'm not talking just life-or-death stuff, I would be calling that something that you need to know right there. There's a very set, short timeframe for you to receive this information before it can no longer be acted upon. So of course a phone call makes more sense there.
  - yoav 4y ago
    Going to a store spontaneously and the other person spontaneously needing something from that store but not going themself sounds wild and unhinged to me. Save everyone the hassle and just don’t call. If she needed something she can just get it when she originally planned to. The unplanned phone call out of the blue can be 100% avoided
    - heleninboodler 4y ago
      "Hey, you mentioned you needed mushrooms for dinner. Did you get them yet? I'm at the store and could grab them right now and save you a trip," sounds "unhinged" to you? WTF.
      - tarboreus 4y ago
        I must be really unhinged. Wonder if this person is married?
msh 4y ago
A problem with phone calls is that they interrupt no matter what. The person calling have no idea if they are interrupting. If I am in my home with family or in the office with colleagues they can look at me and check if I look busy/occupied and then decide if they want to interrupt me.
- heleninboodler 4y ago
  > The person calling have no idea if they are interrupting Nor should they care. This is in your control, exactly as it should be: turn the ringer off.
  - em-bee 4y ago
    that's what i do. the problem is there is never a good time when an unexpected interruption is ok, unless it's my wife or my kids. so my phone is silent all the time. if a phonecall comes in when i am busy most often i don't even notice it. if i recognize the number i'll call back later. contrary to what others say, calls from friends are usually ok, what bothers me most is spam calls. because not only do i get interrupted, but i get nothing positive from the call either. it's just wasted. with a call from friends at least we end up having a useful conversation which makes up for any lost time.
  - gregmac 4y ago
    If they do the same thing, now it takes potentiality days of "phone tag" before you happen to find a time you're both free. With async comms, you initially go back and forth over text/chat/email/whatever. Sometimes resolving in minutes/hours. If you both decide it'd be faster to chat synchronously, you schedule a call and do that. Honestly, that fact async comms exist makes it kind of presumptuous to assume you can make someones device ring at anytime and just get their immediate and full attention. I feel that way both as a caller and callee. There's obviously exceptions, such as immediate family: but we roughly know what each other are doing, and the context. If my wife actually phones me, I will drop whatever I'm doing because it's guaranteed to be more important.

disruptiveink 4y ago

This is a surprisingly popular take, so I'm curious. If texting didn't exist and everyone you talk with had to switch to talking over the phone, how many people would you have to answer per day? This is assuming everyone would turn a text conversation into a call, which obviously is the worst case and wouldn't happen. Everyone with "text message anxiety" I know acts like they have 20 friends blasting on their phone every day, sucking up all of their precious Netflix time, yet I look at their Whatsapp and it's two unread messages from yesterday at best (DMs, of course – undirected group chat messages obviously don't count, groups can be muted and no one expects a reply on those unless they're tagged or it's a general question to arrange something, which is rare).

jasode 4y ago
>If texting didn't exist and everyone you talk with had to switch to talking over the phone, how many people would you have to answer per day? I understand the purpose of your question but it's not constructive to the discussion because you've framed it in terms of not having technical choices to get the response you want. Therefore, the obvious outcome is that people have to have a non-zero amount of answering the phone. Putting constraints on technology (no texting) in a hypothetical question to force people into tautological answers (aha, so you were able to respond to voice calls without bleeding to death which means your feelings are illogical.) Same idea as interrogating people who don't like boats and ships with "gotcha!" style questions: "But what if airplanes didn't exist and you needed to cross the ocean?" -- Obviously, you'd have unhappy travelers that forced themselves to use ships that didn't want to. People do what they have to do which overrides unpleasant actions. But the discussion isn't about what people _had_ to do. It's about _preferences_. The blog author eventually called Barclay's bank but he really didn't _want_ to. A lot of people including many old people before Generation X don't like answering phones. My previous comment about learning that lesson: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008851
- disruptiveink 4y ago
  Not exactly. You are correct I was being slightly duplicitous, but the point I was trying to make is the claims of being "flooded" by personal requests for conversation are, in my experience, almost entirely overblown – note that I'm talking personal here, not business/work related. The objections to having conversations with friends always seem to boil down to "I need to focus" and "too many interruptions". When you're an IC being constantly interrupted by meetings, I agree. But to apply the same logic to personal acquaintances and friends? Anecdotally, people who claim they have no time for talking on the phone will have approximately 2-3 friends they talk on a regular (not even daily) basis and spend afternoons binging TV shows. Framing it as a "so much context switching required!" is what's really intellectually dishonest here. Perhaps there's something that is making people anxious or annoyed of talking synchronously with friends over the phone. Sure. But to transpose the work argument doesn't hold water. Also, once again, anecdotally (but I'd love to see studies about this), people who claim they "only operate well asynchronously" will Never. Ever. Reply to text/email.