I hate phone calls! (some rants and experiments)

I hate phone calls! (some rants and experiments) – SoulRiser’s Ramblings –

I hate phonecalls. I hate how they demand my attention right now without actually giving me any useful information. I hate trying to convey information over the phone. Like numbers, and names, and (ugh) spelling out my name. Why on earth would anyone choose to use the absolute worst communication medium when spelling and getting numbers in the right order are important? And I also hate repeating myself, and I usually have to do that a few times too.

I tend to mostly wake up in the afternoons, and then I see missed calls on my phone from people trying to get hold of me in the morning. Do any of these people send me a message to tell me what they were calling about? No. Almost never. Will I call them back? Not a chance. I know they called, but I have no idea what about. Why on earth would I waste my time calling back if they can’t even have the decency to tell me what they wanted? Not to mention if I call back, I’ll probably have to tell them who I am, and spell out my name, and I just hate talking on the phone in general, so why should I put myself through that?

What annoys me the most is how phone calls are like the default communication method for basically everything (at least here in South Africa). Nowadays more companies are offering email as a communication method, but even then, it seems they don’t really take it that seriously, and in many cases they end up insisting on using phone calls anyway. Something like “Hi, thanks for emailing us, by the way, you just wasted your time, we will only help you over the phone. Call us on this number: XXXXX”…

So, I’ve been doing an experiment, where I refuse to use phonecalls as much as humanly possible. I will inform any people or companies that they need to email or text/SMS if they want to contact me. Here I will keep logs of any interesting things that happen as a result of that. Hopefully I can train some people to get with the times a bit… or at least, I’ll learn which companies I should probably stop doing business with…

more here:

I hate phone calls! (some rants and experiments) – SoulRiser’s Ramblings –