Telephone Tedium

I am most disinclined to answer the telephone these days. Now that we are well and truly in the age of electronic communication I find I have less and less patience with those who insist on the steam telephone as a way of contacting friends and family. This rapid change in attitude rather surprises me because there was a time not so very many years ago when I quite enjoyed a gossipy half hour with a receiver pressed uncomfortably to my right ear. Quite apart from that, those who know me will agree that I am not exactly a technical wizard and processing the practicalities of tech communication seems to take me at the very least three times as long as it should. However that’s the way it is and I plod on until I get there, feeling like the class dunce circa 1947. My lack of patience for telephone callers disappoints those who are still firmly locked into the hand set & receiver chat age though this is by definition becoming a smaller and smaller group as time marches on. My preferred method of communication at present is most decidedly via text and/or email and the cosy chats can oh so easily wait until the friend and I are face to face with coffees safely ordered. I cannot decide when this change in my affections actually took place but it must have been in the past five or six years and as each year passes I grow more determined to avoid telephone-talk if humanly possible. For one thing favouring email or text exchange rather than the telephone gives one decidedly more control over any arrangements that might be made for meeting up. It is so, so much easier to express in text-talk that the proposed visit to the salt-water baths at eight am on Monday morning is a perishingly mind-numbing idea (especially for one who cannot swim) than voicing that particular view when the proponent of the plan is breathlessly awaiting your response in your right ear. By text one can even say: Oh Yuck! - almost impossible by telephone in polite society but strangely just about acceptable as a text message with a smiley face nearby!