I hate telephones

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 had to disable my ringer for all callers, by default, and then manually, one at a time, set a custom ringtone for each of my contacts.

This is completely absurd. Why is it so hard to configure my phone to only allow my friends to interrupt me at any moment of the day, rather than any rando? Turns out, I might also hate telephones.

I don't hear, so I don't phone. However some business is almost impossible to conduct without phoning. AWS requires identification by phone. Customs tried to call me to ask me something about my bike I sent home from a holiday abroad. Credit cards are only unblocked by a phone call. And so on. (And phone relays are only a partial solution because some commpanies deem them insecure - I have currently a credit card I was not able to unblock, I will send them a cancellation notice.)

So, in other words, it's not hatred or perhaps an anxiety disorder, but a real discrimination of a disability, which leads me to agree with Mr Fisher.

There's a scene where David (Matthew Broderick) is alone with McKittrick (Dabney Coleman) in his office being interrogated separated by an office desk. While they're sitting there the telephone on McKittrick's desk starts ringing, which he silently ignores keeping his eyes glued on David, who grows increasingly uncomfortable as the phone keeps ringing and going unanswered.

I recall when that movie first came out there was a terrible tension in the air because nobody ignored a phone back then. Leaving it to just ring away felt wrong and unacceptable. Now whenever a phone rings I mostly just go "ugh" and feel no obligation to get to it at all.

As I watched that scene again I felt nothing of that original tension. I wonder how that scene would effect younger people today watching it for the first time?

If I ever play and win the lottery this is the one thing I would spent big money on. No expensive cars, no expensive wine, just a person which takes care of everything.

Need a new insurance for the car? Tell the secretary to do it. Car is broken? Tell the secretary to take care of it. Need a hotel? Tell the personal secretary to book one. Phone broken? Just send an email "Please order me a Samsung S8" and it will magically appear the next day. Don't like it? Just tell them to send it back.

This would solve 95% of my daily struggles and it would improve the quality of my life way more than any expensive yacht or car could ever do.

In fact if you have a group of half a dozen people who each pay a few hundred $ a month you could almost employ one person who takes care of such stuff even as a not-so-rich person.

- Dial the below number. It'll show a bunch of information, including your voicemail number. Remember/copy the number.

    *#67#

    *21*+XXXXXXXXXXX#

    ##21#

My teenage daughter seems very reluctant to make a phone call. Watching her try and organise something with her friends drives me a bit spare as it involves hours of waiting for poorly worded, ambiguous messages on Facebook or texts, with me suggesting several times, “Why don’t you just call them, and get it all figured out right now?”

On the other hand, watching my Dad buy a new mobile phone is really fun. The salesperson is trying to up-sell him on all the features of a phone, “You have unlimited texts, and it has an app to make you taller, and…” and my Dad just keeps asking, “Yeah, but can it make phone calls?”

I guess I fall somewhere in between.

I do find, when there is a scene in a TV show or movie where someone’s phone keeps ringing incessantly and they keep cancelling it while trying to have the deep and meaningful conversation with someone wanting to yell, “Don’t you know how to turn your phone off?!”

I do hate voicemail. Not so much leaving them, but having to check them. Probably because I hate any “interactive” system that involves sentences like, “To hear a list of all the ways technology has improved your life, please press one…”

Unsolicited calls to mobiles is not a big thing in Australia (yet) so I’m lucky there.

On the home line, I have an old analogue modem to pick up caller ID information for incoming phone calls using NCID[1].

When a call comes in:

* Automatically pauses the music player on my PC.

* Looks up the number in my address book, and displays the information on my screen. Also sends to the two Kodi/OSMC servers, for people watching TV.

This assumes it is not on my block-list. If it is on my block-list of known scammer and telemarketer numbers then it as automatically answered with a recording of the “This number has been disconnected…” message to try and trick them.

[1] http://ncid.sourceforge.net/

My phobia was cured when I got a girlfriend who liked talking on the phone, plus we were away from each other most of the week so it was a good idea to do so. So if talking on the phone gives you anxiety and you would rather not have it, talking to a loved one might be good therapy.

However, I still hate phones (as in phone calls, not smartphones and their wondrous apps) for everything but personal communication with close friends or relatives. I hate how phones bluntly and suddenly interrupt anything you're doing, how you don't necessarily know who is calling, how you don't see the other person's face and how they require to answer now.

When I was younger I seemed to be in a minority for hating phones, but we seem to grow more and more. I look forward to a world where we can conduct any business by email, text messages or, in the minority of cases where it's really needed, previously agreed Skype calls.

I would call them, and be met with a robocall. The robocall would not really have a section for what I actually needed to do, so I would stumble around and often end up at the wrong person. Often we were both confused and it wasn't clear what was going on.

Every time I called, it's a different person. I have to tell them my contact information and details every time. There's no continuity from previous discussions.

Sometimes, the phone would cut out, for a reason I still haven't figured out. Often in the middle of me talking to someone, and since there's no continuity, all that time is now lost.

I had different people tell me different things at the same phone number.

I end up with no record of my conversations, so it's hard to go back later and say: "Hey, they told me to do X, but it didn't work".

Holds, holds, holds. When I finally did a phone call that fixed everything, I spent about an hour and I was bounced between 5 different departments, including one case of being bounced in a cycle. Overall, I had to call this company about 5 times.

I don't hate phones per se, I like talking to people on the phone if it's a productive conversation for both of us. But I absolutely hate the idea of figuring out something important or receiving a service via a phone.

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.

That would be the ringtone. ( I suppose there are a large number of people who have never heard a dial tone.)

Or that they can register their number in a public registry that fully explains who they are and then I can decide whether to take calls from that number.

> The problem is the medium. The problem is synchronous communication. The problem is the telephone. I hate telephones.

> I’m told that, in 1993, 2.5 million people in the UK had “telephone phobia”. That’s over 4%, similar to rates of arachnophobia. This is not unusual, and I’d bet rates are higher now. Everyone hates telephones.

> ...Asynchronous textual communication is how everyone communicates remotely now. It’s here to stay. Killing the telephone is a big market.

I don't hate telephones. I do however hate the implied (and quite arrogant) call to action in that post "I hate telephones and like chat, so we all should get rid of them and exclusively communicate via chat"

Occasions I took unknown calls were all scams, and these days, it just won't worth the hassle of dealing with them.

What frustrate me the most is when I call them back, it's not a direct line, and/or when the person doesn't answer yet their voice mail is not activated so I can't leave a message.

I recently made the mistake of helping carry the load at work by answering the phone there. It's alright, mostly scripted, & my lack of customer friendliness (Surprising the amount of silence yes/no answers invoke) will hopefully transition us away from having a developer handling support calls soon

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 my phone off. As it is, it's at nuisance level but still usable.

Online chats on websites are usually undermanned and overall useless. On the phone I am sure I have at least one person's attention. The rep isn't trying to talk to five people at the same time, we can both focus on the issue, the back and forth is almost instantaneous, and we can come to some conclusion at the end.

A recent example: I wanted to book a suite at a hotel. The hotel is not tall, and it overlooks a very noisy bar on one side. Is it possible to get a suite on the other side? Where will I be located, anyway?

This information is not online. Instead I have to engage in a phone call. Spend some time on hold. Bounce between people who work in the hotel and a reservations desk a couple of time. Eventually I get the answer, and it's exactly what I want.

But. I'm bothered in two directions. One, that the information is not at my fingertips.

The other, that I find it irritating to have that actual conversation to get the information I want. I'd like to have a better handle on this mental impatience.

And as for receiving I remember someone mentioning that a ringing phone is essentially someone saying "Speak to me now, speak to me now, speak to me now". It is an inherently rude form of communication because it demands instant attention with no regard to what you may be doing.

I just don't answer calls these days unless they are from family. I was getting a lot of sales calls from my electricity provider who also wanted to sell me gas. We don't have gas at our home, but they wouldn't log that fact. So I blocked their number.

Last week I got an email from them saying that they had been trying to call me for some time to let me know about an amazing offer, and that they think I may have accidentally blocked their number.

Of course, they couldn't just put the details of the offer in the email. I had to call them.

I wonder how he would have survived in the days of only telephones and no text messages, or in the days of no telephones and only unexpected raps at the door.

His indictment of telephone customer service is thorough. Even people who don't normally dread phone calls probably dread trying to call a company.

Not only are 99% of phone calls a waste of time, you’re inefficient with no written log of the conversation (not even for security but also to improve workflow and prioritisation / memory recall), furthermore the impact of the context shifting from what I’m currently working on / deep in thought over to a jarring phone conversation at the time that suits the caller - is incredibly disruptive.

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.

/ring

Me: Hello.

Caller: Hello, is this <my name>

Me: Who is this?

Caller: IS THIS <my name>?

Me: Who is this?

Caller: Sir, I can not give you any information until you identify yourself.

Me: Hahah. /click

Don't call me and make demands. Seriously. If you aren't willing to tell me why you just called this number, I'm not even going to verify I'm a person let alone identify myself.

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.

I've never liked the phone, but I really hate it these days when there are so many better ways to communicate.

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)

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.

Now, it is always a distraction... my girlfriend frequently calls without warning in the middle of a text conversation, and i often don't answer because i'm not ready. It takes a far greater level of attention and commitment to talk on the phone than to participate in a text based conversation.

In addition to potentially avoiding phone calls in the future, this also makes it more likely you'll actually be informed if you owe them money or otherwise need to respond. Otherwise, they don't have to make any effort to contact you over any medium other than paper mail (and if you're lucky phone), and if you happen to not read it or not answer the call, or maybe you've moved addresses and the forwarding period has ended, they can just send your account to collections. Only then, once your credit is sufficiently ruined, will the collections agency actually put some effort into getting a hold of you.

It's such a crazy system, there really needs to be some kind of national digital notification service to replace USPS for sending people legally binding notifications and bills.

More companies might need to accelerate towards offering text/chat options for their customer service if they don't already. It may not directly put a customer off, but it might be another signal in a list of comparisons that pushes the scales in favour of a competitor.

1. Why do we use a loose, unstructured medium like voice for customer support and the script and restrict almost everything about it? Maybe basic support would be better in a different medium and only escalations go to phone? 2. Social engineering is still one of the most effective ways of hacking and the phone is a great medium for that. Yet we apparently year the phone like a more secure channel.

And you know what? Most friends quickly learned to respect it. They know they can always communicate to me via e-mail and I'll happily call them back or meet or whatever is needed. I use my phone mainly as a minicomputer with an additional function of communicating with the person I choose. And for these rare cases when I actually need to wait for an important phone call (this happens once a year maybe) I use an old throwaway phone with a prepaid SIM card. I only switch it on for as long as it's needed.

At one point I was getting dozens of spam calls every day. I thought I'd just whitelist the numbers I'd want to let contact me, but for some reason Android does not come with this feature. The problem with 3rd party apps is that you still receive a call, but it hangs up immediately, so you will still have a notification and sometimes a vibration if the app doesn't respond immediately. So I said to hell with it and I turned off all incoming calls. If people need to talk to me, they can leave a voicemail or text me beforehand.

Also, has call quality completely tanked in the last decade or is it just me?

I have noticed a reluctance to use the goddammed phone as intended - rather than call me to discus something important and time sensitive people will just add a task to base camp in a some what passive aggressive way

You see typically extroverted people having no problems with being on the phone all the time, probably because they call equally extroverted people who do the same. Look at sales people, or people who have to work with other people a lot, they approach the phone as a tool for getting what they want and quickly.

My solution, as an introvert, is to never answer calls from people who are not my family. I have a twillio service setup that manages my voicemail and sends me an SMS message of the transcription, that way I can review the content and purpose of the call and decide what to do next (although I don't think Twilio's voice transcription service can accurately decipher British accents that well so you do end up with some hilarious results)

99% of time it's either recruiters who've managed to scalp my number from somewhere, or the odd spam caller.

For me, I'll give an example - chimney sweep. The company I use lets me request a service appointment online and lists it's prices online. The rest I saw I had to call for both prices and appointments. No, thanks.

That's generally the only thing landline phones are good for anymore. When I lived in the UK I was with the nerdiest ISP there (AAISP) and they offer a "broadband only" landline, that carries your DSL and a basic diagnostic service including a dialtone (mostly to prevent wayward OpenReach engineers from misdiagnosing your copper pair as "unused"), but no real phone calls. Suited me fine.

I know it's all YMMV, but the number of spam phone calls that I receive has dropped to zero (not exaggerating here). There used to be one annoying travel/timeshare caller, but I reported them to the FTC two or three times, and that took care of it. I personally believe that it's fairly easy because of the time and date information that your phone's dialer/phone app records, but it could be easier with a bespoke FTC "donotcall" app. I'd rather involve the FTC in this sort of thing because it is part of their mandate, and benefits that they bring get propagated to all phone users (Android/iPhone/Windows Phone/feature phones/landlines).

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
  <Response>
      <Pause length="600"/>
      <Hangup />
  </Response>

I think this will be interesting because there is probably a lot of overlap between people critical of phones and people critical of voicemail ... but it's actually sort of difficult to have a phone without voicemail.

If you disable voicemail with your carrier, it doesn't work the way you think (hope) it will. When you fail to answer, the carrier gives some weird message about the subscriber being unavailable which just makes people think you don't pay your phonebill or something. In short, you cannot, from the standpoint of your carrier, just have no response other than ringing.

But with twilio you can ...

I've spent a while thinking about this over the years. I think a much better form of interaction is the landline answering machine: the caller will be heard for a few seconds ("Hi it's Bob, are you there?"), the recipient can decide whether to answer, and if not then the caller doesn't know if they were available or not. Contrast that with current BS like "it disconnected after one ring, so I know you hit cancel".

A similar mode of interaction is that of the walkie talkie, although that doesn't give the option of leaving a message.

I would never call if there is another way using text or other medium, I will not answer if it is not known or there is a good probability I know what it is. If I really have to make a call, that entails preparations and lots of wasted energy (it is wasted since would write it down, and then I could just send it as text and it would be easy to read and understand...)

Sure I can and do use Truecaller, and other ways to block spam or unwanted calls, and It really does work. I still hate the phone though.

I really hate the phone when someone rings me and spends 10 minutes getting to the point of the call which is something that could have been done in a text/email, wasn't urgent and largely is a yes/no thing.

Also if you send and email and then ring 20 minutes later to see if I got the email a) I hate you b) I'll DND your extension (I read the manual for our phones at work - I think I am probably the only one who has).

The only person who can actually make my work phone make a ringing noise is the boss, everyone else who isn't on the DND list just makes the display flash blue.

I'd be surprised if there isn't a twillio-based system for this already...

I can’t believe we’re at version 11 of iOS when people needed a backgrounded/tiny phone UI since about iOS 2.

But author has a point about banks being particularly egregious offenders of phone dependency. They are progressing. With voice print and zelle. As well as iris scans. But I still need face to face in person meetings about once per month. And though face authenticated live full duplex video can serve as a proxy. Trust that is built from a personal connection may never be disrupted.

Completely irrational, I know, but that's where I'm at. Usually if I want to make a phonecall I arrange it with the person for a set time that suits both parties.

I would think sooner or later the telemarketers are training the public/the masses that answering unknown calls isn’t worth it making it an unprofitable business. Just read all the comments here and on Facebook re: this... ppl just don’t answer the phone like they use to.

For me If we haven’t spoken before text, email, FB or leave me a voice message and I’ll call you or actually answer your call.

What? No.

Once upon a time, a business department could take a message and return it later. You know, exactly like what you would do with email. Asynchronously.

It's easier to lie and say "I'm deaf" because they have some awareness of that.

Also, in England, you can self refer to IAPT and most people start under 6 weeks and 96% of people start under 18 weeks.

2. I never answer my calls. They go to voicemail. All of them. I do not even have incoming phone service in the first place; I have a data only plan and an Anveo subscription. I will call you back via VoIP if I choose to do so, at my convenience, at my desk, indeed armed with all the data I need to make a successful call.

I still don't get why people would prefer phone over texts or emails. The main thing I miss is a copy and paste!

As both an introvert and a technical person I do almost everything I do with deep concentration, whether that be coding, playing piano, reading papers, biking, driving, or hiking. A single phone ring, a single "hey what's up", while I'm in the middle of coding causes a cataclysmic implosion of an immensely complicated thought structure that takes a several minutes to rebuild. A single phone ring while I'm biking or driving is honestly dangerous. A single phone ring while I'm playing the piano and not only will I lose track of what I'm trying to learn, but I will also not be in a state of mind to speak a human language, and will probably answer the phone call with gibberish. Hence, my phone is in airplane mode a lot of the time. The rest of the time I have a call blocker on that only accepts calls from a few known numbers. The only time I turn off the call blocker is if someone has pre-arranged a phone call with me and it's on my calendar.

I also highly value social time and try to give 100% undivided attention during them. I loathe people who look at their phones while I'm trying to talk to them, and people who ask me to go to dinner with them and then go on a phone call for 50% of the dinner. It makes me feel unimportant, makes me feel like I wasted my time trekking out to meet them. I don't want to do the same thing to other people.

I realize that not everyone is like that. But I get the worst end of the stick when people think they can just call me "sometime in the afternoon". Realistically that means I will get NOTHING done that entire afternoon except wait for your damn phone call because I need to deal with your inability to schedule a time and respect my time. I honestly miss the days when cell phones had not yet been invented. I miss the days when people would just set a time and place, meet, talk, leave, and get on with business according to a plan.

I do, however, love the ability to access the internet from anywhere for maps, bus/train times, news, and other information, when I want it.

Oh, another reason I hate calls and typically shut my phone off is because it's increasingly difficult to do so in privacy. I spend a lot of time outdoors, on public transit, and so on, and the last thing I need is a bunch of bystanders staring and eavesdropping on my calls, and even commenting on what I'm speaking. I also don't like it when contexts mix, e.g. friends from different circles hear conversations of mine from another circle. It results in me going into a shock state where I basically cannot talk. It happens so often that I just stopped using voice calls altogether, for the most part.

-- Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert comic strip http://blog.dilbert.com/2010/09/03/phone/

I have a publicly listed number (in addition to a private one), and I have not received a spam call this year even once. When people call my phone, it is warranted.

Telephones remain the best way to contact emergency services, or settle things which you have no option to settle in person.

Life is too short for inane babbling. I can read faster than the average person can talk.

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.

The story also reminds me an old joke/anecdote. English gentlemen club, a gentleman naps in a chair near the fireplace. His boots are almost on fire. One man notices that, but the club etiquette disallows one to speak to the person he doesn’t know. After looking for pretty long he finally finds someone who at least knows the name of that gentleman and is able to speak to him. They wake him up and after a greeting the gentleman who knows him says: “Dear Sir, it is rainy weather today, and this fireplace is conveniently hot. By the way, I’m sad to tell you that your left boot is already burned down.”

I think that author puts too many gentle ceremony into just a short call.