Why couldn’t this call be an email? Why would you call, when you know that you are near indistinguishable from spam calls about Microsoft services and Nigerian princes?
Phone etiquette for the 2020s:
Message:
Hi, I wanted to talk about X. I think it’ll take about 5-10 minutes. When would be a convenient time to call?
Phone calls themselves don’t annoy me. People who expect to call you at any time and then get upset you won’t drop what you’re doing to speak to them annoy me.
This makes me irrationally angry because whenever I hear this, putting the time it took to ask would have been enough time to just type up a few sentences in an email that would explain everything everyone needed to know and then we’ve also got it in an easily searchable format so we can reference it later if needed.
I may be a little bitter.
I greatly prefer messaging, but sometimes I call because it’ll take me 5 minutes to talk on the phone and 25 minutes to get it all hashed out through texts.
I’m so glad that spam calls aren’t a thing where I live yet. SMS spam is a relatively new phenomenon here.
EDIT: I completely skipped over the point of the post. If you’re busy, or you don’t want to be called, can’t you just decline the call?
For me an email is when I don’t need a quick response. A text is when I want a faster response but I don’t want to interrupt what the other person is doing. A call is when I want a quick response and I think it’s worth interrupting the person.
I very rarely call.
I remember a very rude university lecturer called me once when I was in Tesco. He told me to turn off the Tesco self checkout because of background noise. I was in the middle of buying my groceries. Wut.
