I hate telephones (2017)
jameshfisher.com
jameshfisher.com
The problem for me is the asymmetry: Someone interrupts whatever I'm doing with an unrelated random topic and wants me to make a decision or answer questions, with basically no time to switch contexts or think. This is infuriating to me.
At least with work, friends and family, for the last several years I've not even really used the "phone". All my calls are either scheduled conference calls, or adhoc calls initiated after a text/chat message.
It's just contractors, dentists, daycare, stores etc that still use the phone primarily. Hopefully they'll all join the 2010's within the next decade or two.
If texting didn't exist and everyone you talk with had to switch to talking over the phone, how many people would you have to answer per day? This is assuming everyone would turn a text conversation into a call, which obviously is the worst case and wouldn't happen.
Everyone with "text message anxiety" I know acts like they have 20 friends blasting on their phone every day, sucking up all of their precious Netflix time, yet I look at their Whatsapp and it's two unread messages from yesterday at best (DMs, of course – undirected group chat messages obviously don't count, groups can be muted and no one expects a reply on those unless they're tagged or it's a general question to arrange something, which is rare).
I understand the purpose of your question but it's not constructive to the discussion because you've framed it in terms of not having technical choices to get the response you want. Therefore, the obvious outcome is that people have to have a non-zero amount of answering the phone. Putting constraints on technology (no texting) in a hypothetical question to force people into tautological answers (aha, so you were able to respond to voice calls without bleeding to death which means your feelings are illogical.)
Same idea as interrogating people who don't like boats and ships with "gotcha!" style questions: "But what if airplanes didn't exist and you needed to cross the ocean?" -- Obviously, you'd have unhappy travelers that forced themselves to use ships that didn't want to. People do what they have to do which overrides unpleasant actions.
But the discussion isn't about what people _had_ to do. It's about _preferences_. The blog author eventually called Barclay's bank but he really didn't _want_ to.
A lot of people including many old people before Generation X don't like answering phones. My previous comment about learning that lesson: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008851
Anecdotally, people who claim they have no time for talking on the phone will have approximately 2-3 friends they talk on a regular (not even daily) basis and spend afternoons binging TV shows. Framing it as a "so much context switching required!" is what's really intellectually dishonest here. Perhaps there's something that is making people anxious or annoyed of talking synchronously with friends over the phone. Sure. But to transpose the work argument doesn't hold water.
Also, once again, anecdotally (but I'd love to see studies about this), people who claim they "only operate well asynchronously" will Never. Ever. Reply to text/email.
My parents would receive about 5 to 20 calls every day, which I had to answer and be sort of like a secretary (as they were often not at home) - this was before mobile phones. This was an experience that was very very not pleasant.
That's not an impossible rate. It does seem improbable, however.
And yes you called friends out of the blue because how would you communicate otherwise?
On a personal level, I don't consider "Netflix time" interrupting anything -- it's like the lowest priority thing I ever do, and I'd happily answer a call from a friend or family member. I and most of my friends have kids, so we rarely spontaneously call each other: it's usually preceded by a text along the lines of "You around?". I'm not sure what would happen with only phone; probably just less communication overall. Today I'll sometimes get (or send) a text in the middle of the work day, but I'm not sure that would be replaced by a phone call -- it would either happen outside work hours or not at all.
Excluding group chats is also not really fair: for example a group chat I'm in now has been about arranging a get-together soon, and that would likely involve several phone calls to make it happen and figure out a time that works for most people.
There's also some correspondence that happens over email today that you'd have to consider. For example, if you're moving (selling / buying houses) there's a whole ton of things with real estate agents, lawyers, bank and insurance that have to happen. If your lawyer calls to confirm a couple details, you either interrupt what you're doing or pay them extra as they can't finish their work and will have to pick it back up later (your return call is just as interrupting to them!).
Yet the information systems we live in are also designed to continuously distract the hell out of us.
If you need to focus, turn off your phone, lock your door, and do not go online to read and post.
Otherwise come join your fellow human animals in the beautiful dance of communication that gives us our superpowers!
Problems it solves:
- Not having something to hand, or having to look something up: I can take my time and find it, then email/text back
- Being interrupted: I'll get back to you once I'm free
- Dealing with business hours: I can email at 10pm and you can get back to me when you're in work the next day
- Not having a record of communication: I can have an unbroken chain of communication the entire way through that we can both refer back to
The only real negative is less immediacy, but things are rarely needed right now. If we kept phone calls to only things that were necessary right then and there, we'd hardly ever get them.
Save everyone the hassle and just don’t call. If she needed something she can just get it when she originally planned to. The unplanned phone call out of the blue can be 100% avoided
If I am in my home with family or in the office with colleagues they can look at me and check if I look busy/occupied and then decide if they want to interrupt me.
Nor should they care. This is in your control, exactly as it should be: turn the ringer off.
so my phone is silent all the time. if a phonecall comes in when i am busy most often i don't even notice it. if i recognize the number i'll call back later.
contrary to what others say, calls from friends are usually ok, what bothers me most is spam calls. because not only do i get interrupted, but i get nothing positive from the call either. it's just wasted. with a call from friends at least we end up having a useful conversation which makes up for any lost time.
With async comms, you initially go back and forth over text/chat/email/whatever. Sometimes resolving in minutes/hours. If you both decide it'd be faster to chat synchronously, you schedule a call and do that.
Honestly, that fact async comms exist makes it kind of presumptuous to assume you can make someones device ring at anytime and just get their immediate and full attention. I feel that way both as a caller and callee.
There's obviously exceptions, such as immediate family: but we roughly know what each other are doing, and the context. If my wife actually phones me, I will drop whatever I'm doing because it's guaranteed to be more important.
Also have that issue with MacOS!!!! If you have headphones on (so volume not zero) and you need to reboot it will Chime out loud via the build in speakers. that sound does not go through the headphones period. So you're sitting near someone sleeping and for some reason you need to reboot and PPPPPPOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNN! Thanks Apple! >:(
I'd prefer to just disable it 100%. Maybe some mac guru knows how. You have to remember to set the volume to zero before you reboot. Maybe Apple should make iOS and iPad OS also have startup sounds just to be consistently annoying.
How hard would it be to implement a timer that just sees after x minutes there's no activity, so reset to the clock? I guess this just isn't a feature that sells microwaves or that you can even put in marketing material, so it never gets done.
... and then I moved into an apartment that has a microwave that has no mute option. I'm getting closer and closer to just finding and cutting that beeper wire...
Microwaves have substantial amounts of power going through them, I entirely agree on the safety callout - they're probably the scariest thing in your house to poke around in, now that vacuum tubes are mostly gone.
My parents have a toaster that beeps very loud twice when the toasting is done. Come on, I'm waiting at the table next to the toaster and the natural noise of the bread being released is more than enough. I wonder if the engineers actually tried their shit in real conditions. These beeps are just annoying especially just after waking up and there's no way to disable them. And yes, I would be afraid of using the toaster when someone is still sleeping.
If the power goes out, i don't really need the UPS beeping to tell me so. The beeping is so maddening. Power goes out at night, i don't care! don't wake me up! Power goes off during the day? I'm fairly confident all of the lights and computer monitors and fans shutting off will clue me in.
Phone calls are actually great, especially in these days: it's the only way to ensure you can have a stable, consistent conversation with someone that's not standing in front of you (individual or business), in an age where it became socially acceptable to skim text messages without reading them properly, leading to obnoxious, error prone communication, or to just stop replying to people whenever you feel like it, even when in the middle of a somewhat synchronous messaging session, in particular when you're forced to make a decision or relay bad news to the other party (the horror!).
"No one should ever be able to interrupt me, absolutely ever" is a disturbingly entitled and modern take. Not too long ago, it was perfectly fine for people to turn up at your house unannounced, to pay you a visit, for no reason in particular other than to engage socially and you were expected to host them at your house (!). Surely we can deal with the very occasional call from someone that wants 5 minutes of your time, no? This opinion is so popular that I wonder if I'm the only one who doesn't have dozens of people competing for my attention on a daily basis.
If spam calls are an issue (and I understand they're absolutely horrid in the US, whereas in the UK, where the author is from, you may get one or two spam calls ever couple of months, from my experience), just don't answer unknown numbers unless you're waiting for a specific callback, as most people do.
The article then goes on about a couple of unrelated things that have nothing to do with telephones, such as companies having inadequate customer support channels or online banking functionalities. Taking his Barclays example, he could do what he wanted (adjust loan repayments) in branch, yet it is of course time consuming to do so. If Barclays was unable to service him by phone, would he also be denouncing "talking to people in real life" in general because that's the only method this particular bank offered him for servicing his account? No one is arguing changing your loan repayments shouldn't be an online banking functionality there.
And yes, if you're ill but can't be arsed to call your NHS GP, then you're clearly not sick and shouldn't be tying up already strained public resources. If you do have a proper disability, then I do believe your GP should arrange for an alternate means of communication with you. "I don't like phones" is not a disability, it's entitlement.
I have developed a telephone phobia when things started to fall apart between some people and me. I got really scared of phone calls and seeing particular people call. While this is no longer an issue, the fear has been embedded in me. I have rationalized some of it with a "I don't want people to interrupt me". In reality, I don't mind being on a phone call to discuss something, but these have moved on to other platforms.
I mostly get these days spam calls specifically from outside of my country of residence and recruiters (specifically English! - plenty of +44 numbers). Unlike years ago (in the US for me), I remember 95% of all calls were meaningful, the complete opposite of where it is for me now.
Regardless, I agree with your statement. This is anecdotal for me, but the march of technology and its imposition on the way we communicate has also resulted in the creeping march of very low-brow behavior unseen in times when talking to someone over some network involved just picking up a phone and calling them.
Not really. Maybe for the particularly extroverted individuals, but I'm quite aware of people, both older and younger generations, who would love nothing more than to have nothing to do with anyone disturbing the peace of their homes.
Folks out in the countryside especially have such a tendency; people go out to live in the country in part because there's less god damn humans to deal with compared to city life.
I think that people are blissfully unaware of how different things were before we gained the ability to instantly communicate across long distances at all times. Even those who lived through it have forgotten, or have no wish to go back (as you said, who wants random people to arrive? Not many people. But still, THEY DID)
I was attempting to drive the point that we've gone from "you can be interrupted at any moment when you're home in and be expected to host friends" from "I get severe anxiety if I get a phone call". Clearly there's a point in between, or do most people really like the hermit lifestyle? Even if some people in here are genuinely busy with hobbies, side projects or genuinely lead a busy life, most people I know that express this point of view are most definitely not doing anything remotely interesting with their free time.
The fact that extreme social isolation (either on purpose or not) is one of many factors that can lead to steep decline in mental health suggests that behaving like this is not good for us, yet a life of "do not talk to me ever, email me if you must" is always seen as the perfect end goal in most of these discussions.
yet, equating "likes to not be interrupted on someone else's schedule" with "likes extreme social isolation to the point of mental illness" is a weirder one.
just because i want people to text me that they're coming over, and waits till i see it and confirm that that's cool with me, doesn't mean i'm into driving myself crazy in solitary confinement. this is the default for most people agreeing with the article, and folks like you are just upset because you hate not being able to get your hit of extroversion in on your schedule but have to wait (more than in the 80s) for folks to agree to share their social energy.
sigh
https://slowrevealgraphs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/scre...
That very much differs with social class and location. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visiting_card for the elaborate social conventions which developed amongst the European and American aristocracy regarding visits to the home.
Meanwhile the land line gets about 2 spam messages a day, and 1 real call a month. And being the owner of an LLC seems to mean my cell gets about 5 spam calls a day. The ringers stay off, and I still hate the phone.
I hate it, it makes you a slave of housework.
I think you're exaggerating it, it's more just that interrupting people is considered rude because we have so many less intrusive means of communicating now. If you want my attention, right now, no forewarning, you should probably have a good reason unless we have the kind of relationship where I expect out-of-the-blue calls and you know my schedule.
> Not too long ago, it was perfectly fine for people to turn up at your house unannounced, to pay you a visit, for no reason in particular other than to engage socially and you were expected to host them at your house (!).
Yeah... because we didn't have cell phones. And it sucked. Especially with socially clueless people that didn't have good boundaries. I remember having to play that "hide from the windows until they go away game" as a kid because an obnoxious neighbor would tie up way too much of your time unless you were blunt to the point of being rude; and well, you don't really want to do that if you live next to people right? I'm glad that practically never happens anymore because the norm is you don't bang on peoples door.
> Surely we can deal with the very occasional call from someone that wants 5 minutes of your time, no?
Well, sure, but they can text first right? "I need 5 minutes, are you busy at the moment?" Solved.
Especially in a work setting I have seen many times where email discussions or message discussion go overboard with lots of misunderstandings, heated feelings etc and once you get on the phone with the other party you solve the issue in just minutes.
It's easy to use harsh language in text, but on the phone things usually calms down. It's also less error prone as in a phone discussion the feedback loop is truly real-time vs messages/slack/email.
You can also better hear and sense the feelings of the other party.
Two thoughts come to mind. First, the effort required for somebody to turn up at your house ensures that this would happen much less frequently than the relatively costless telephone call. Second, some folk probably hate phone calls more than in-person conversations.
Doesn't the NHS provide an app to do this exact thing asynchronously? Those apps are ubiquitous across the EU.
> Doesn't the NHS provide an app to do this exact thing asynchronously?
It does. I book appointments directly through the NHS app (have done twice in the last few weeks, in fact). Back in 2017 when the article was written things were almost certainly a bit different, though that feels about right for when I would've first been booking online using the Patient Access app.
A better title would almost be 'Telephones make me anxious' because I don't think they hate the technology itself.
Well except hundreds of online services that heavily depend on phone numbers (for pseudo security) I simply refuse to use.
However life definitely is better with less unsolicited distractions.
I mean, if we need to have a conversation sure, let's talk, but if they're just trying to feel out if I'm interested in a role, just email me the job description. I don't want to talk with like 10 people a day and tell 9 of them I'm not interested. As most coder's know, it's not so much the interruption itself that's bad, it's the context switch, and/or the anxiety of it. (To be honest this is why I also prefer to pick up my food orders rather than have them be delivered -- I don't really like being "on call" in that sense)
Most of my friend's and family just do a "is now a cool time to call?" thing for casual conversations. I think that's really the best approach.
Also, while I don't feel an "entitlement" in terms of demanding nobody calls me, I do get annoyed when people feel entitled to a prompt response if I'm not expecting to hear from them. A lot of times I like to stash my phone in another room so it's not a distraction; but some people get really salty if you don't reply in an hour or two.
https://www.theverge.com/22792060/call-screening-android-12-...
This video shows it clearly in a real demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R04GxUr6ibM
You can easily screen people with the text to speech and block spammers without picking up.
Well you could implement a virtual secretary with Twilio incoming call webhooks or some similar service. How it works is up to you.
A transcription streaming service would be nice. Think of a webhook but based on some streaming protocol (websocket?) instead of HTTP requests. I'm not aware of any commercial or free API that supports this.
my VoIP line costs ~$23/month, the PBX is nominally free (3CX software didn't cost anything and i don't pay for rackspace/VMs at the datacenter i use for it), but it could be hosted anywhere. the best part of a public IP PBX (and 3cx in particular) is that you can have your most common contacts download the app and scan a QR code, and now you have presence, texting, voicemails, etc on a "secure line" that never goes out on any real phone network[0]. We don't use this feature anymore, but prior to the lockdowns in 2020 it was a nearly daily thing while we commuted or whatever. Now if we need to call we use Matrix or just regular cellphone calls.
[0] this also works for children who don't need or want a SIM enabled phone with all that entails. Kids can call grandma on an app that doesn't require a phone number to register for...
If somebody wants to talk with me, text me or voice message. Telephone blocks me and burns my time which i may or may not be willing to burn. So people just calling me while they are on the treadmill or on the train, or trying to sell me something, I simply don't accept it. Async communication is much better, and when sync is a must, we can still ask via other channels if the other part is able to talk.
Of course, there are problems with the phone system itself (let's just mention robocalls), but it's just a matter of time before you'll get robomessages on any kind of messaging platform too, although maybe they will be easier to filter out. Robocalls do happen on phone because that's the platform where most people are reachable (and because it's easily doable on scale).
And there are problems with call centers having completely incompetent people answering. But this doesn't mean that the problem is inherent to the phone...
Finally, phone is one of the few really interoperable telecommunication systems (like e-mail is, but mobile messaging platforms like Whatsapp/Signal/... are NOT, at least not until the EU will oblige them to, which is planned). Imagine if you could only receive calls from people using the same phone brand as you, or anything similar...
Easy access to SIP trunks is the problem, SIP trunks that don't enforce a connection between ANI, BTN and Caller ID.
The telephone network was never designed for non trusted parties to have access to the signaling system for the PSTN.
Neither analog lines, nor TDM ones need much in the way of authentication, or encryption - because of that tie to a physical line, and a physical nexus.
Very little if any spam/swat calls are coming from the analog side of the PSTN, a marginally larger but near zero amount comes from traditional TDM services, the bulk of it is shoddy SIP carriers.
Absolutely spot on, and brilliant, and funny if not also sad.
I hate telephones - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15677560 - Nov 2017 (431 comments)
He preferred teletype, and had a teleprinter in his home. Maybe still does.
It should cost a small amount of money every time you called/emailed someone.
I don't understand this. Are you autistic by any chance?