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The first minute of every phone call is torture now

theatlantic.com

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Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#391

Post by rsynnott »

Animats wrote: post #355
kibwen wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key word there being analog phone lines. Cell phone lines, which account for 99.99999% of all phone communication these days, are IMO worse than VOIP for sound quality (though better at latency). It's weird that kids growing up in the post-landline era will never realize how clear and amazingly low-latency phone calls used to be. If two people were seated across a table talking on a landline, they'd hear the sign…

"The key word there being analog phone lines." No, the key words are uncompressed and non-packetized . The best telephone voice quality ever was ISDN from handset to handset. Digital end to end, 64Kb/s without compression, and rigidly clocked at the bit level. No noise. No jitter. Switzerland had ISDN to the home for years. Also, in Europe, there was power over ISDN, so the phone didn't need AC power or batteries. A…

In Ireland, until _weirdly recently_, after ISDN had died out for pretty much all other purposes, every government minister got an ISDN phone installed in their house, to make them easier to interview in the radio.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#392

Post by myself248 »

silveroriole wrote: post #128
gary_0 wrote: post #12

Because phones aren't allowed to have bezels anymore for some reason, I'm constantly hanging up on people because there's no room for a proximity sensor to turn off the screen so my cheek presses the "hang up" button. It tries to use the front camera as a makeshift sensor, but it doesn't work very well. Recently I reacted with incredulity when the people on the other end could properly hear me through a newly-connect…

Same happens to me with the mute button. It also seems hard on newer phones to find a position where the speaker is clear - shift it by a millimetre and now you can’t hear anything. The phone is so big that holding it completely still for a long call is uncomfortable. People ask why everyone holds the phone out and uses the loudspeaker now, well…

Worse yet, the "muted" and "not muted" states of the button are visually distinct when looking at them side-by-side, but if you just see one in isolation, you'd be hard-pressed to determine which it is. Gotta poke it a few times to see it change, you know?

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#393

Post by mikewarot »

Animats wrote: post #355
kibwen wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key word there being analog phone lines. Cell phone lines, which account for 99.99999% of all phone communication these days, are IMO worse than VOIP for sound quality (though better at latency). It's weird that kids growing up in the post-landline era will never realize how clear and amazingly low-latency phone calls used to be. If two people were seated across a table talking on a landline, they'd hear the sign…

"The key word there being analog phone lines." No, the key words are uncompressed and non-packetized . The best telephone voice quality ever was ISDN from handset to handset. Digital end to end, 64Kb/s without compression, and rigidly clocked at the bit level. No noise. No jitter. Switzerland had ISDN to the home for years. Also, in Europe, there was power over ISDN, so the phone didn't need AC power or batteries. A…

Cellular phones used to sound good back when they were FM and not packetized, as well.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#394

Post by SoftTalker »

daviross wrote: post #213
dr_dshiv wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Receiver anxiety” should crawl off into the forest. It’s a youth-millennial thing that inhibits waaaay too much authentic social action. People are just too scared to be human. Just call me! I might pick up I might not. For that matter, if I don’t respond to your email in a day, treat it like a phone call and just try again. Don’t assume I’m ignoring you. It’s just e-mail.

> if I don’t respond to your email in a day, treat it like a phone call and just try again. Don’t assume I’m ignoring you. I mean... aren't you ignoring them? It's an email. Where'd the first one go that the second one is going to be any different?

I read your email, got interrupted, and did not reply. Then I forgot about it.

If you email me again, it might get read at a more convenient time, and I'll answer.

Same reason I might not answer your call: I'm busy with something else or not near my phone at the moment. This used to be normal by the way -- if I called your home phone and nobody answered, I'd have no choice but to call again later.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#395

Post by WorldMaker »

r00fus wrote: post #358
larrik wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be over-doing it. Most robo-calls wait for a second "hello?". So you can say it once, then wait a bit for a human to answer normally. Then if they don't, you just hang up, as the computer is waiting for that 2nd "hello?".

I even just answer with a grunt or in a foreign language (e.g. "hola"). People know I may be juggling a mobile handset, automated systems hang up.

That is something I often rely on ambient noise to do. My work keyboard is quite loud. My home a/c makes a ton of white noise and the occasional thump when it clicks off. It also currently makes a lot of loud water sounds when it is off. I use throat clearing and coughs sometimes, too.

It's a silly game to play with these robocalls what they are/are not listening for and it seems to change from time to time (and obviously from bot to bot). "Dead silence" is sometimes easiest and the easiest way to describe it (though I believe I did mention I generally put things on speaker and rely on ambient noise), but yes, not "required" and it is a dumb space to explore sometimes.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#396

Post by SoftTalker »

hutzlibu wrote: post #35
pavlov wrote: post #22

Phone calls should have a subject line, just like emails. It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context. If call metadata included a subject line, software could automatically screen out calls where the subject is empty or spammy, just like with email. It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, sh…

"It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, should I panic?!” It also removes the need to leave rambling voicemail." Well, what is stopping your wife from also texting you, if it was something important and she did not reach you? And what would force her, to use a potential subject line? Otherwise it is an interesting idea, but I doubt it will b…

> Well, what is stopping your wife from also texting you,

LOL. She does. "Call me"

Very helpful.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#397

Post by bobsmooth »

vineyardmike wrote: post #329
tristor wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Différent generations have different norms Yes. > and it’s not right or wrong. No. This sort of relativism of all norms, mores, morals, and ethics needs to stop. There are some cultural and social norms/mores that are better than others. We know this, because empirically some produce better outcomes than others. Mass-scale social anxiety at having to interact with another human being is NOT healthy for society, and…

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess 17 year olds who can’t call people aren’t the reason for societies problems. Certainly less to blame than the 45yo’s who bemoan them. Every generation thought that society was collapsing. Despite that, time progresses, people age out of the population and a new generation is born. And society (mostly) doesn’t collapse.

Those 17 year olds grow up into adults with the same unaddressed anxieties.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#398

Post by pjdesno »

The US telephone system has been digital except for the "last mile" since about the 80s. Speech is encoded as 8-bit samples at 8KHz, giving a Nyquist frequency of 4KHz, and using either µ-law[1] (US) or A-law (Europe) compression - you basically sample at 12-14 bits or so, take the logarithm of that value, truncate it to 8 bits and send it, and reverse the process at the other end.

If you take 24 of those 64Kbit/s channels and multiple them you get a T1[2]; 28 T1s were multiplexed into a T3. Basic ISDN multiplexed two 64KB channels and a 16KB signaling channel on a single wire, but it got very little use in the US.

The signals from those modems we were using in the 90s were getting digitized a few miles down the road, and at the ISP end the modem banks often connected directly with the digital phone system via a T1 line. (In fact "56K" modems relied on having a digital connection on the other end; the fastest modem speed with analog on both ends was I believe 33.6 with a V.34+ modem)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Μ-law_algorithm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#399

Post by vineyardmike »

bobsmooth wrote: post #397
vineyardmike wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess 17 year olds who can’t call people aren’t the reason for societies problems. Certainly less to blame than the 45yo’s who bemoan them. Every generation thought that society was collapsing. Despite that, time progresses, people age out of the population and a new generation is born. And society (mostly) doesn’t collapse.

Those 17 year olds grow up into adults with the same unaddressed anxieties.

When I was 17 I spent like an hour emailing a teacher telling her I’d be late on an assignment by a day. Because I was very anxious about writing an email to a “superior” and didn’t know how it’d go, or what the “right” email looked like.

Now I email hundreds of times a day, and have constantly shifted deadlines to no professional detriment. I still get nervous emailing a new important person, but you do it anyways.

Do people really forget what it’s like being young? Sometimes you just grow up and move on.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#400

Post by eeperson »

svachalek wrote: post #292
jmbwell wrote: post #186

Article plays up the fumbling for effect, but is otherwise spot on. The PSTN was immensely overbuilt. Old Western Electric equipment is, literally, built of tempered steel, from the crossbar switches in the CO to the red telephone on the desk. The human artifice erected in between, electrically and mechanically connecting a microphone at one end to a speaker at the other, was staggering in its analog complexity, and…

Absolutely. Same with turning on a TV these days. People used to flip a switch, now it's a highly technical process that takes a few minutes.

It doesn't have to be. If your devices support HDMI-CEC[0], then you can turn on 1 device and everything sets itself up. For example, I can turn on my PS4 and it automatically turns on the TV and sets the correct input.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Control

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