I HATE talking on the phone. I don’t think I can overstate that. Even people I know, it fills me with dread. Nowadays I kind of have an excuse not to answer it. Literally billions of spam calls blanket our phone system and I frankly don’t remember the last time someone that I KNEW called me… but even people I know, as above, it fills me with dread.
There’s something about not being able to see the eyes, not being there in the space, not being able to really read people’s cues that makes me feel like I’m not really talking to THEM – just some strange avatar that sounds like them, but may or may not ACT like them…
And the physicality of cell phones makes it worse. They are insubstantial slabs of glass and plastic and metal – am I going to mute things by mistake? Is the connection still there? A comforting carrier tone or gentle hiss of static to know that we’re still hooked to one another would be great, but there’s not – it’s just a floating, disembodied voice coming from a too-expensive device that GENERALLY is funneling me lies and hyperbole.
Nowadays we can hide behind our pathologies. If we name it we can pretend like it’s okay and try to expect others to function around it and so I think of myself as having some sort of phone-based social anxiety – but there are times when you can’t hide behind a self-diagnosis and you HAVE to get on the phone except you haven’t been practicing and now it’s all the MORE awkward.
Yeah, I absolutely HATE talking on the telephone.
And so today I was pleasantly surprised to realize that a friend’s voice is exactly what I needed. Chuck the Madd Ox gave me a call about a gig that he needed a hand on and I didn’t pick up. We tried to resolve via text as I struggled with website issues and email issues and wedding gig issues – but eventually I went ahead and picked up and // hearing the smile in that man’s mellow voice was exactly what I needed.
So I guess I hate phones, but Chuck gets a pass. He made me step back from my horrible computer for a sec and he made everything better, if only for a couple of hours. I needed that.
1 thought on “April 24th, 2019.”
Who knew???? This makes every phone conversation we have ever had suddenly super cool!!!