One Ringy Dingy

Lots of questions being answered over the next month. Go find out the whys and wherefores.

I hate phones. I always have.

They’re very intrusive. If I want to talk to you, I’d call you. Or better yet, I’d see you in person. Doesn’t mean I don’t like you. It means I don’t like phones. I’m not much of a chatter and I don’t like small talk. Plus, I need all of the sensory information you get from an in-person meeting. I need to see what you do with your eyes and how you move your body so I can read between the lines. Words and tone of voice alone can be very deceptive. Yeah, I’m always looking for lies.

I feel very disconnected when talking on the phone, almost like an out-of-body experience.

My mother used to talk for hours - like three hours in one sitting to just one person - and I couldn’t comprehend it even though I watched and heard it happening. What the hell could they talk about for three hours. It made my brain bleed. I sart to zone out after about four minutes. Just ask my daughter.

Phones are tools for a specific purpose. I have a question or a request, I call, I get my answer. Chow.

Utilitarian.

Really important conversations should not take place over the phone.

I think the first time I ever answered the phone was when I was about eight. I wasn’t supposed to answer the phone, but my mother was busy, so she told me to answer it. It was my Austrian uncle who told me (in German, of course and I’m not sure why that matters) to tell my mother that my great-grandfather was dead. From that point on, I’ve associated the phone with bad news.

I can let a phone ring forever and it wouldn’t bother me. I prefer to keep them unplugged or silenced. It was easier to get away with that before the advent of cell phones being organically attached to our bodies.

I like texting. But that involves writing, so, no, duh, on that.

On to the actual question for the day:

3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?

I don’t specifically rehearse a specific phone call per se. I rehearse all conversations, long before I have them, long before I even know I’m going to have a conversation. I’ve got conversations with everyone I know going on in my head all of the time. Maybe that’s why I run out of small talk.

More likely it has to do with my immense fear of the unknown. I think it’s a real phobia for me. I can’t stand not knowing something. If I’ve done something once, I’m good and I can do it over and over again. I’ve done things just so I can tell myself, “You’ve done this, so you don’t have to ever worry about it again.”

I think there might be something wrong with me.