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I hate telephones

jameshfisher.com

11–20 of 449 posts

Re: I hate telephones

#11

Sounds to me like this guy has an anxiety disorder that he's masking as a hatred of phones.

I agree with you. This is not a normal response (unless he's joking):

>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. The stand-off was only broken when mother texted me to tell me to answer the phone. I hate telephones.

Re: I hate telephones

#13
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.

Re: I hate telephones

#14
post #4

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 the…

Probably might be best if you tell someone about your inability to do customer support than have them find out the hard way...

Re: I hate telephones

#15
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.

Re: I hate telephones

#16
post #10
post #7

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…

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.

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.

Re: I hate telephones

#17

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…

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.

Re: I hate telephones

#20
post #4

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 the…

You do realize that you likely wouldn't have a job without those annoying customers who are calling for support?
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