telephones

I was just emailing a friend (hi, Rick) and was talking about telephones. I'm off them, at the moment. A few things have come up recently to suggest I'm just the opposite of most people, which I'm sure makes it very confusing for people who are trying to get ahold of me. One was when a vendor left a voice mail for me one day last week, in the morning, and I never listened to it, and then she emailed to follow up at about 3 that afternoon and I responded right away. She asked, "What's the best way to get ahold of you?" and I said "Email." And wrote back with some additional numbers in case I'm out of the office and found myself saying, "Voice mail is fine, but it's probably best to follow up with an email to let me know you left it." That's just the opposite of everyone else on earth, isn't it? (Problem is the red "message" light doesn't tell you who it was and what they want.)

I've actually had a problem calling strangers on the phone since I was a teenager. I could argue that it traces all the back to when I was a new talker - there's a comment in my baby book in my Mom's hand that says, "Tends to stutter when she gets excited." I don't stutter any more, very much, and I had three years of speech team training in High School and 11 years of lecturing experience, so I'm a pretty good public speaker now (if I do say so myself). But I will still put off a phone call to a stranger forever, so obviously I still have a resistance to it. I can conjure up with hardly any prompting any number of calls I've made where it doesn't get started very well, it's not stuttering, exactly, but it might be a "ha-hem" thing in the throat, or words getting tangled up, or not explaining who I am quickly enough and getting a gruff and suspicious reaction from the other end. The phone is not my thing.

I'm supposed to be calling everyone back in Australia all the time to keep in touch with them, especially the ones who were the most distraught and crying and guilt-inducing when I left. The writer, whose girlfriend's mother is at death's door and it's all very stressful. My old neighbor, who had gone through a whole series of events that left her in deep grief and sadness, and then I went and did this to her (that's the one I feel worst about, they sent me some lovely Christmas presents that just delighted me but I haven't thanked them at all yet - totally going to hell for that one. She doesn't do email because she associates it with work, so she doesn't even enjoy getting messages from me, much less writes me back). My dear friend in WA who, bless her, calls me every couple of weeks for a long chat, and I never call her back, but she has faith and continues to reach out and has kept the friendship going through large geographic distances, even larger now.

Right now I've got a few fruitful email conversations going, and I'm keeping ties with all those friends. But the phone ones, I feel desperately guilty, but I just can't do it. Or, just won't.

And I had a thought this evening, which went in the email to my friend. In my last job I was a customer relations manager. My job was that whenever any client called me, I had to sound delighted to hear from them, even when they were a difficult customer or were unhappy with us or we'd done something really bad and I was being professional and trying to explain the implications to them. I had to sound delighted to hear from the customer who spent $70 a month with us and I had to spend as much time on the phone with them as they wanted me to, giving them Internet 101 tutorials or helping with basic HTML questions, even though the customer who spent $250,000 a month with us was right in the middle of some crisis emergency that I would have preferred to have been solving instead. This experience has left a certain amount of fakeness in my vocal transactions with people. I know I use it at work, I can be in paroxysms of anxiety, and feeling depressed and tired and sorry for myself, and still in the corridors I answer "How are you?" with "Great!" and my cheeriest and charmingest of smiles. I know I still get overly polite with vendors on the phone, like I was raised in an British Empireal outpost camp in India in the 1930's. I hope it's not putting people off. But I also hope I get over it soon.

Anyway, so the point of that is, I think I now associate the phone with fakeness. Thinking about calling that very friend instead of emailing him, I knew I would adopt the cheery tone and lighten everything up in the conversation like how people do when they're on about day 15 of their new Prozac prescription. So, email is better. I'm being more honest in my typing than in my talking. You guys are getting the very best of me!

Love,

Ellen