The lost art of the phone call.
Remember long phone calls?
When I was a teenager, our kitchen phone was mounted on the wall; the cord was long enough so that when I got a call during dinner, I could stretch it around the corner into the hall closet, where I’d close the door and conduct whatever urgent business was required (“What are we doing tonight?” “I dunno, did you call Babs?” “She doesn’t know what we’re doing either.” “Do you wanna go to the mall?”). And I also had a phone upstairs in my room, so that I could spend long hours on the phone with a friend late at night (“So what did Babs do while we were at the mall?”).
Somewhere in the intervening years, those long, purposeless chats with friends turned into IMs.
Me: Gotta reboot this POS again
BFF: Sucks
Me: Yeah
BFF: So, what are you doing tonight?
Me: Dunno. You?
BFF: Dunno. It’s almost dawn over here.
Me: Oh yeah.
Now that I’m older, the only long, purposeless chats I have on the phone are conference calls.
CEO: Has Toyko joined yet?
NYC: Nope
CEO: And we’re waiting for Sydney, right?
FRA: Yep
DFW: Babs says she’ll be here in a minute, she’s finishing up another call.
CEO: So, what’s anybody doing tonight?
But the rest of the time, the phone has turned into an instrument used only for very short transactions.
“Can you get the SOW signed by Monday? Okay, great. Staff are ready to start on Tuesday. Fine, I’ll get the conference room booked for them. Bye.”
“Can you come see me?” “Sure, five minutes.” “Okay, bye.”
So I’ve discovered that I’ve lost the fine art of hanging out on the phone with a friend. It doesn’t help, of course, that my kids have discovered that there’s a set of wireless headphones in the house that pick up the signal from the cordless phone (I have to confiscate them when I want to have a private conversation). But in general, these days are so busy that if I’m not Getting Something Done on the phone, then I can’t just stay on the phone.
Time to pass it on to the next generation. My oldest wants to figure out what she’s doing this weekend.
I definitely think that’s an age thing. Or rather, a matter of practicality and opportunity cost with time. Hell, it sucks to be able to use those terms to explain something so simple and pure as leisure time to do nothing….nothing at all!
Thankfully I still have IM and texting which are nice because I can fit replies in between actually doing the silly things adults need to do (like clean the inevitable dust that invades my bookshelves!).