The Case for Picking Up The Phone
I heard it before I saw it.
The stock Apple ringtone and accompanying vibration announcing the millennial equivalent of an imminent saber tooth tiger attack.
I looked over at my phone (face down on my desk, of course, so as not to be a distraction, even though I know full well the real way to remove the distraction is by placing it in a drawer or separate room entirely) and turned it over to see what fate awaited me.
A phone call? What is this 2010?
I’m parodying myself, but it’s the truth: as a woman who grew up in the age of texting, emailing, and IMing before there was DMing, phone calls are not instinctual to me. It’s not that I don’t love talking. (I also grew up in the age of landlines and was the queen of tying up my household’s for hours.) It’s that I don’t love feeling unprepared. The impromptu, think-on-the-spot nature of phone calls doesn’t leave room for the vague, filler words I can hide behind in emails.
In phone calls, there’s no “circling back” or reviewing the entire email chain to remember what date you actually said. There’s no “I hope this finds you well,” passivity, or guessing at what tone someone was using when they said “Thanks.” instead of “Thanks!”. In phone calls, there is only honesty and directness. Your full humanness on display, right here, right now.
→ Which is exactly why in our line of work, phone calls can be especially valuable.
It’s easy to forget there are humans at the other end and on the other side of the work we do. Injured humans, stressed humans, anxious humans, confused humans, but also oftentimes perfectly pleasant humans!
While emails can certainly be more time efficient and serve us well when availabilities don’t align, sometimes what takes two days of back-and-forth emailing could be resolved with a 15-minute phone call that also has the bonus of hearing another person’s voice and gauging their mood and understanding of a situation. Often, the string of words and forwards and attachments and time stamps muddies the waters on a straight-forward question.
Yes, this coming from the woman whose palms sweat when her phone rings with a work-related matter, but I soothe myself with a simple reminder of mine and my caller’s humanity.
A reminder we could probably all use for each other these days.
Sure, phone calls can be less convenient than firing off an email, but what if inconvenience is the price we pay for true connection and acknowledgement of each other’s humanness?
Let’s pick up the phone and find out.
☎️