That’s as in ‘fear of talking of the phone’, as taken from the famous BT Commercial:
Unless the date was written on it, I’d never have guessed that this was from 1991 – I woud have thought it the best part of a decade earlier. It really shows how adverts (and corporate identities) change really fast.
But I digress …
It’s not that I have a fear of the telephone, it’s just that it pisses me off to talk on the phone. One of the reasons is that the line is usually so bad that I’m having to guess at half of the things the other person is saying. And, more often than not, I’m speaking to a non-native English speaker anyway and so it’s not so easy to understand what they’re saying at the best of times.
The thing is that you can’t do much with a phone call. Once it’s finished, it’s gone forever. Unlike an email, I can’t file it, forward it, copy and paste parts of it into something else, add attachments to it and send it to a third party, cc it to half a dozen people, etc., etc. It’s gone - and any important information that was contained within the conversation will have gone along with it as my memory is fast getting to the ‘insufficient RAM’ stage.
Also, incoming phone calls are bloody annoying because you can’t choose when to receive them. Chances are that they come in when I least want someone calling me, such as while racing through mad Egyptian traffic on the way to a meeting where I can’t get my phone out of my pocket because the seat belt’s in the way.
There’s only one thing that’s more annoying than getting a phone call and that’s when some knob-end decides that they want to voicechat with me over Skype. Do they really think that I am sat in silence with my headphones on just in case someone decides they want to voicechat with me?
No I bloody well aren’t. To voicechat means that I have to turn off the music that I am listening to, unplug the speakers and plug in the Skypephone thing that takes a couple of minutes to sort out. Then the connection is usually just as shit as with the mobiles here because the connections aren’t much good either. So don’t do it unless it’s really important and you give me a couple of minutes’ notice that you want to do it.
IM conversations (i.e. text chatting) is definitely better than voice, but it is still very intrusive because I still can’t choose when to have these conversations. Time and time again I have to tell IM ramblers to email me instead as I’m in the midde of something more important and can’t concentrate on chatting with them.
As I am a creature of the night who gets up later than he should do, it seems as if, when I crawl to my PC, straight out of bed and with my eyes still blurry as my contact lenses adjust to ‘awake mode’, there are half a dozen people ready to pounce on me as soon as they see my status go from ‘Asleep’ to ‘Available’ – and this is a lot more than activity that my semi-comatose brain can cope with after coming straight out of bed.
No, phone calls and IM’s have their uses, as in for getting a quick and simple answer to a quick and simple question, but that’s about it. And chatting for the sake of chatting pisses me off majorly. If I want to talk useless bollocks with someone, I’d rather do it face-to-face over a drink. Or write about it in a blog.
So by far my preferred method of communication is email. It’s a wonderful thing for many reasons. The first is that I can choose exactly when I am going to answer the question. Usually this will be very rapidly – often in under an hour if I am in front of my PC (which is where I am more often than not). In the worst case scenario, I will answer all important emails before the end of the day as I have long had a rule that I don’t go to sleep until I have answered all my email (the important ones in any case – if it’s a stupid question from a complete twat, then they can wait until the following day when I am in a better mood).
A second reason why I love email is that I have a very intricate filing system where each old message can be stored some place I should be able to find it without too much searching. Google Desktop Search makes everything really simple as well -a real boon to someone like me that needs to process over 100 emails (incoming and outgoing combined) per day.
Finally, I have developed a system over the years where my Inbox is my ‘To Do’ list. I know that, if something is still in my Inbox, I still need to do something with it. If not, it gets filed away for future reference.
This is one reason why I never got on very well with Gmail. While I could see the use of the ‘Conversations’ facility which adds all incoming and outgoing messages to one string, I just hated the fact that these hundreds of messages were all there as soon as I opened it, freaking me out whenever I opened it.
No, although I am a big fan of Google in general, Yahoo! Mail beats it hands down these days for not trying to reinvent the wheel.
Oh, and another advantage of email is that it is free to send and receive. I really begrudge paying money just to get in contact with people when I can email them for free.
So, in summary, if you want to Contact Me, do so by all means – it will be really nice to hear from you. But please email me in order to avoid irritating me more than the rest of the world does already.
