I used to be like this until I got a job that required constant phone calls. Now if I have to explain something using more than three sentences I’d much rather just talk.
6 years of tech support and I dread email troubleshooting because I know it will take two weeks and 13 exchanges before we can actually start troubleshooting.
I’ve worked as phone support for a year and I hate phonecalls even more.
I’d rather send an email with detailed steps and let people follow the instructions at their own pace. If they fail - remote.
Phonecalls are a weste of everyone’s time.
This is the same as me. Outside of work, though, I’m the cat in the meme.
I disagree. It really is just way simpler and also in most cases it solves whatever problem you have much faster.
The trick is to not respond for an hour and hope their next message is “nvm, fixed it”
Unironically works. They start typing the email and rubber-ducky themselves half of the times.
No irony, this is a core skill when you’re in tech leadership. If you’re the people pleasing type, always replying immediately is a classic trap.
Easier if you send it to me in writing so I can properly digest it instead of having it immediately spill out of my ears.
I’m with you on this. I prefer important conversations that require me to make a decision or remember something in writing. Just general conversation about what you got up to on weekend? Fine let’s talk it out.
I understand so many more people prefer verbal communication because it’s easier for them to not have to type or put their thoughts into written words. I just wish more of them understood that it’s not the same for everyone and come to a compromise.
Okay, but this is less of a question and more of me having 10,000 choices to make that I’m not actually allowed to decide.
So can you just sit on the phone with me and tell me which buttons I can press without getting fired?
Seems like a management issue.
Christ, tell me about it
Y’all don’t talk?
Some of my friends insist on calling. Apparently they’re used to doing VIDEO calls. Like guys, please, have some mercy.
VIDEO calls
One of the bigger reasons I don’t want an iPhone. I’d much rather talk than text as it usually is quicker, but I hate video calls.
“Please leave a message at the blank screen.”
Sometimes it really is much easier though.
At work this request means “I’m going to ramble for 45 minutes because I don’t understand it enough to form a question”.
This is exactly what my dad does. “It’s easier” means “I can’t be bothered to spend five minutes figuring out what the question I really want to ask is, and write it out in a ten word text. So instead I’ll ramble for fifteen minutes and hope you figure it out for me.”
When people say “it’s easier” they mean for them, not you.
It’s a pretty standard bandwidth/latency tradeoff in my view: email is high bandwidth (it’s in writing, you can re-read, etc.), whereas phone is low latency (several back-and-forth explanations can happen in seconds). Each has its place.
If social anxiety is a factor, that’s a perfectly valid, but separate, issue.
I begin every business-related phonecall with “I’ll want this in writing”, and end it with “please send me an email with a summary of what we’ve talked about”.
Guess what, the amount of phonecalls and complaints has halved, because I have proof in writing.
y’all need to just bluntly tell the people around you to get to the point, with that in place phonecalls are absolutely the quickest way to figure things out
im introverted but i actually prefer this than arguing over text
The best thing about arguing over text is that you can just ignore it!
Though you shouldn’t
“No.”
Crisis averted, can get back to fixing things now. The only way you’re getting me on the phone is if there’s some audio component to the problem (alarm buzzers or tones they aren’t able to identify) that isn’t easy to explain in text. Other than that, there are usually just a handful of common issues and you can tell which path we’re going down after a sentence or two of their description.
Me, sending a ticket to another team: “Man, I hope we can get this solved in the ticketing system”
Me, getting a ticket from another team: instantly calls them
I find zoom calls to be much more helpful than in person. In person I have to bring my laptop, point to things, find a place where we can both sit, and probably send you code snippets over chat anyway, not to mention literally looking over your shoulder.
meatspace is deprecated, get over it corpos.
I’m mostly this way, but not today.
I had someone with an issue signing up for an account mention that they were not successful because when they tried to sign up, they got a message that they weren’t eligible because there was already an account using that email address.
I told them if they have a Gmail account, just use the + addressing feature, otherwise, just create a Gmail account.
Someone else responded on the first person’s account “But they don’t have Gmail, so they can’t do it.”
Let me tell you, THIS is a situation where a call is necessary. There’s nothing I can type that will suddenly unravel the layers here and that won’t lead to more layers being laid. It will be 100000000000000% easier and less time consuming to schedule a meeting/call and talk through this than it would be to continue this discussion in text format.
