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I hate telephones

jameshfisher.com

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Re: I hate telephones

#41

Post by strathmeyer »

throw401 wrote: post #34

I hate telephones too, and I DON'T have an anxiety disorder please!!! I'm just not the guy always ready for a call. I rarely pick up the phone or open the door for a unknown call, and yes it can create stress. Quite often I am very focussed and balanced, one call can ruin that state. If you cannot find yourself in this, please don't create a disease out of it.

Yes, things that cause you stress can be neurosis and psychoses. If it ruins your focus it is affecting your life and can be classified as a disorder.

Re: I hate telephones

#42

Post by sunseb »

I agree. Every times I receive a phone call, I know that:

Someone wants somethings from me ("please can you do this or that for me"). Or it's bad news. :-/

Email and text messages are better tools for me: you answer when you want to whom you want.

Re: I hate telephones

#43

Post by auggierose »

kibwen wrote: post #37

I receive about 20 spam calls per day. In contrast, I receive about 0.2 legitimate calls per day. Google itself suspects that these are spam calls, because it pops up a bright red "SUSPECTED SPAM CALLER" warning when the phone begins ringing. And yet, I have found no option to have the phone automatically decline the call. There's not even an option to silence the ringer for any call not from my contacts; I actually…

You can install an app that kills all unknown calls. That's what I did.

Re: I hate telephones

#44

Post by robbrown451 »

kyberias wrote: post #8
ducttape12 wrote: post #3

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

Yeah, let's make diagnoses of people we don't know because of some blog post.

So how are you supposed to intelligently take in an article like this if you can't speculate on the causes of the trauma he reports? "Diagnosing" someone is by definition done by an expert. Having a suspicion as to the cause of something (even if that cause might be a mental disorder), is something regular people do, in order to make good decisions.

Re: I hate telephones

#45

Post by dialtones »

superflyguy wrote: post #25

"Last year, I received a series of 3am calls. At the dial tone, which is set to a horrifically unadjustable volume, I was woken from deep sleep to deep panic. " That would be the ringtone. ( I suppose there are a large number of people who have never heard a dial tone.)

I went to the Badlands in August with my boyfriend and his recent ex’s son who lives with his mom and us at our house. Anyway, we couldn’t set up camp late one night because the site was full, so we got a cheap hotel room.

The kid picked up the phone in the room and said: “It’s making a noise.” Boyfriend said: “Maybe you called the front desk by mistake.” Kid said: “No, it’s some kind of buzzing noise.” Boyfriend laughed and said: “Oh, that’s the dial tone!” I immediately felt old. This ten-year-old didn’t know what a dial tone was.

It’s easy to forget that kids are growing up with different technology than we did. :)

Re: I hate telephones

#46

Post by blacktulip »

I must be a very different person compare to the author. I prefer phone calls a lot more than text/emails. Because I can usually get a result in a much shorter timespan.

Re: I hate telephones

#47

Post by mikestew »

superflyguy wrote: post #25

"Last year, I received a series of 3am calls. At the dial tone, which is set to a horrifically unadjustable volume, I was woken from deep sleep to deep panic. " That would be the ringtone. ( I suppose there are a large number of people who have never heard a dial tone.)

Except that checking for a dial tone is mentioned later, so I’m going to go with ESL rather than ignorance of what a dial tone is.

Re: I hate telephones

#48

Post by ChuckMcM »

There are a number of phone answering services that will ameliorate this issue. These guys charge $1/call (http://www.answeramerica.com/telephone-answering-service-pri...) (no relation to them).

In terms of startup ideas, there is probably an Uber like service opportunity here. An app where your "operators" can download and put on their phone, and when ever they want to they can put them selves "active" at which point you will route calls to them over your VOIP network, they take calls, record the data (name and number). You pay them per hour to be on-call, your customers pay you per call, and for infrastructure you need an enterprise account with a VOIP provider, a web site, and a way to accept payments. (That might be what Answer America is doing, I don't know but it seems pretty doable)

Re: I hate telephones

#49

Post by dataker »

It's not just customers.

I manage teams of support engineers/agents.

They will do anything to avoid a phone call.

Indeed, almost all the time, phone calls lead nowhere, only to emotional distress.

If you have a really serious issue, you need to escalate to an actual software/platform engineer, and that's something that takes hours, if not days.

Re: I hate telephones

#50

Post by cdelb »

If I don't recognize a number, or have a scheduled call, I will almost always let the call go to voicemail. Then I'll decide if the call warrants a call back. Usually it doesn't.
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