Phone calls that are supposed to be for fun ruin my day every single day that they occur & I wish we would all collectively agree to never have them again, amen.

There is no other social interaction that is as hobbling as phone calls. Before quarantine people walked together, drank or ate together w/o the sounds of chewing drowning out the other person, or played games together. Every other social interaction is multitasking & I hate phone calls because they lock me down w/o other tasks to enjoy.

Speakerphone doesn’t work because it echoes, holding the phone between shoulder & ear hurts, headsets tangle & there is no practical way of enjoying a conversation w/ someone on the phone when your hands are tied & you, like me, wish you could be busy eating or upholstering a chair or washing your dishes. The only good solution is to drive while on the phone & people need to agree to hang up when you reach your destination.

People will always insist on talking to you on the phone & then they will always take more than 30 minutes. Today someone made me talk/listen for an hr & 15. I couldn’t eat, shower, workout, or even answer other messages which were appearing on my phone & were related to my plans later in the day. The phone call just existed to ruin an hr of my life under the guise of enhancing it. & people who love phone calls won’t accept that you don’t, & no matter how many times you explain or refuse, they truly don’t respect you or truly don’t care so they ask again & again until you cave. & it’s not as if I DON’T miss my friend who called me. I just wish we could have talked in any other way. This particular friend is a member w/ me of Soka Gakkai International, a Buddhist practice which believes in chanting & therefore also believes that “the voice does the Buddha’s work”. Since quarantine it has been these friends who most desire to talk on the phone; to share voices as a form of encouragement. So I frequently stop what I’m doing & try to do a voice call w/ these friends, but more often than not I spend the entire conversation gritting my teeth & pulling my hair out.

& let’s talk about the lag, because cell service providers seem to not be addressing this even though it can double the length of every conversation seemingly unabated. I was raised to be an active listener, meaning I ask questions when you pause, nod, & use paralanguage to show that I am listening. Phone calls are an iron maiden for people equipped w/ these skills unless they are willing & able to completely alter or eliminate good habits in order to endure an unpleasant form of communication. The lag makes it so I can’t tell when the person on the other line is pausing for breath or in thought. The lack of   body language (something barely addressed by video calls, too) means they can’t see me nodding along, so I rely really heavily on “Yes” & “Mhm” as indicators of my understanding, which never fail to make the other person stop talking & ask “What were you going to say?” when I wasn’t really saying anything. I was probably just hurrying you along so that we can stop this nonsense & I can use my hands again.

& none of that is to say that there’s never ever a reason to talk on the phone. I use the phone for work, or if I’m making an appointment, or for checking the  inventory of a store before I go shopping; these conversations are more efficient over the phone & rely on a steady exchange of information. They are not pleasure calls. Even yesterday, I tried to encourage an old friend who ghosted me 6 mos ago to call me on the phone. She was ready to reconcile, & I wasn’t.  I just wanted to know what I did to deserve to be ghosted – these 2 conflicting goals were impossible to convey w/o tone, so in the end we both probably seemed angry in text messages (I thought she seemed angry so I probably did too), & a phone call could have lasted 10 to 30 minutes & aired out all our grievances, maybe allowing us to reconcile if I had understood why she ghosted me. But she refused to talk on the phone until I agreed to work on being friends again, a position I respect because talking on the phone is simply too much work for no return, & I told her that since I didn’t know if I was willing to reconcile w/o her explaining her old behavior, it was probably time for us to drop it & I went on my merry way still not knowing why she traveled 8 hrs to visit me w/ 2 kids in tow but then came very close to never speaking to me again. & I feel fine about it, because that’s her prerogative. She doesn’t have to want to be called by me, especially after how we left things. Nobody has to want to talk to anyone over the phone. It’s too much work w/o the stimulation of doing something else w/ your hands, body, or even YOUR PHONE.

We all carry around fabulous little computers now which we rely on for everything. To make plans, to remember plans, to stay in touch, to use social media, to listen to books & podcasts & watch movies, to research everything from the mundane all the way up to the important like “What are the precautions I need to take before visiting my mother in another state.” Phone CALLS no longer fit into the way we use phones. I’m sure there are arguments to be made about how I could certainly get some wireless earbuds & walk around up to something else while my friend over a voice call encourages me to read a book she’s really enjoying, but that doesn’t make pots & pans any quieter if I need to make dinner or let me read her lips while I clamber around reorganizing my bathroom. Part of the comfort/discomfort paradigm of a phone call is how you are allowing someone into your home or car to keep you company, but it is fully impossible to carry on a normal conversation over the intimacy of brushing your teeth or going to pee w/o setting up boundaries like “Hey, shut up, I need to pee & this is awkward because you’re not here to watch me walk toward the bathroom & interpret that visual stimulus.”

 
There are only 2 acceptable pleasure calls. 1 is right before bed when you’re not doing anything else anyway. The other is while driving. That’s it. Keep all of your other phone calls out of my precious free time & away from my precious smart phone which I may need to do something else w/ @ any given second.

Fun fact: written @ the gym on a stationary bike, using my smart phone & listening to an audio book 🤷