SteveJamieson.com

1. Do you like talking on the phone? Why or why not?

No! In fact, I hate the phone. It’s evil evil evil!

When it rings, it demands to be answered immediately, so you either have to drop everything to attend to it, or ignore it and hope that it’s not important. Also, when calling someone there are a variety of annoyances. If you don’t know them that well, then you have to hope they will recognize your name. If no one is home, then you have about 3 seconds to decide whether or not you want to leave a message on the answering machine and to figure out what you want to say. If someone else in the house answers the phone, then you have to request the person you want, which is especially interesting when kids are involved, or you know the person who answered but don’t want to talk to them at the moment. In addition, I despise having to take messages for others. Finally, telemarketers… ’nuff said.

Face-to-face, email, and IM are all preferable forms of communication for me. Mainly because they are more individual and controllable. You can only talk to me in person, or IM me at times when I choose to make myself available. Similarly, I can read email at my leisure. When you email or IM me, you contact an account used only by me, so you know that you won’t have to go through a third party, and I can immediately know who it is that is contacting me. I look forward to the day when we can all use voice IM so that we have a communication medium similar to the telephone but with individual accounts, and the ability to control our accessibility. Cell phones actually come close to this standard in that they can be turned off when one doesn’t want to be bothered, and in that many people have their own, individual cell phone number, which allows one to contact them directly, and through caller id, know who is calling.

2. Who is the last person you talked to on the phone?

Jon

3. About how many telephones do you have at home?

Three

4. Have you encountered anyone who has really bad phone manners? What happened?

I don’t think so.

5. Would you rather pick up the phone and call someone or write them an e-mail or a letter? Why or why not?

I prefer either email or IM depending on the nature of my need to contact the person.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2003 at 2:55 PM and is filed under Friday Five. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.