Hell
Hell
Hell
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.
You assume that you are talking to a competent person who has a real difficult problem, which is not the case in 95% of the time and they have some bullshit trivial thing that you already told them 5 times.
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 think my main problem is how disruptive it is to your focus. With text I can write a semi quick response then get back to what I was doing. Whereas a phone call requires me to drop everything and give a fellow human my full attention in realtime. It tends to drain my already small social battery.
email is high bandwidth
I don't think the reasons you stated are about bandwidth, and considering writing an email is IMO more effort than explaining on a phone call and will take me longer, I'd argue phone calls are higher bandwidth than email - at least in one on one conversations, since things change when you want to inform multiple people.
Though of course what you listed is important, and it sucks when people refuse to write out basic details that you could come back to later or forward to somebody else.
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.
Y'all don't talk?
Sometimes it really is much easier though.
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."
As long as they ask before they call it's no problem. If they call without writing first it's annoying
Yep, I'm the senior member of my team at work and I have to train a lot of newbies. When my supervisor tells me to start my training I message the person on teams to make sure their ready, then call them, then either share my screen or have them share their screen.
I work in international freight and every shipment is different, it would take 30 minutes to type out everything they need to know for every individual shipment. If I can show them while talking about each aspect it only takes 2 or 3 minutes per shipment.
And I'm someone who hates talking on the phone and screen sharing, but sometimes it's just what you have to do to get the job done efficiently.
I used to be like this, then realize when I die, all these moments will just be erased to history, so I'm like, whatever man. Can't escape it, banking problems, job interview calls, etc...
But online multiplay game voice chat? Nah fuck that, aint touching that radioactive shit, I aint playing multiplayer if that's a requirement. I'll die on this hill.
If you have a male sounding voice and you are open and friendly and communicate well, gaming voice chats can be a good experience, depending on the game. Mostly they aren't, though.
I have a male voice and I communicate well but I’m not friendly and fuck voice chats for multiplayer games. Fuck that shit to hell.
I think I'm gonna get a lot of people screaming at me for poor aim.
Honestly today I'm mostly thinking "I have other shit to worry about, like the pie in the oven". Ain't nobody got time for worrying about phone calls
If they need to call me it's either actually complicated, or (much more likely) they haven't spent enough time to refine their idea to where they could just write it down.
I often end up being a rubber duck.
Or they can't fucking write. I'm a programmer and many of my colleagues over the years have been entirely unable to form a coherent idea into a sentence or paragraph. For a lot of them, that's why they became programmers in the first place.
Nine times out of ten it's the second one. I don't mind being a sounding board for some people, but so many sloppy thinkers just don't understand and don't want to make the effort.
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.
Exactly this. If it wasn't confirmed in writing, it didn't happen.
"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.
The hell is this comment section? Is every lemmy user some kind of IT person? There is place for text, there is place for calls, and there is even place for actual presence, all depending on actual problem and yours and other person's understanding of it and ability to articulate through different mediums.
I think an abnormally large portion of lemmings are in IT
My manager is like this. I don't know how to him it's easier to talk about something technical over the phone rather than in chat or email. When talking to people about IT crap, you have to sugar coat and use euphemisms which I don't have to do as much in email and the benefit with email is I can convey literally what I'm trying to do. My manager just doesn't want to fucking ready my emails.
Yeah, why would anyone want to have a two minute phone conversation when they could exchange the same amount of information over 20 emails across three days?
Honestly: the medium does not matter all that much imho. The one person in the conversation not being able to get their shit together is the problem. If everyone involved can communicate what they want to get done by when and what i have to do with it, im fine with a phonecall. Im even willing to summarize it via text afterwards if i don't have to be the fucking rubber ducky again. Ugh.
"did you leave the milk out of the fridge?"
Usually such a simple yes/no answer in my experience.
That's my sister. Good fucking god. I don't care about the supposed drama of your workplace. It is not interesting. You'd think that my tone would be enough to get thru her thick skull that I HATE TALKING ON THE PHONE but noooo...
Aww she just wants an outlet 🥲
You can just tell her that but noOOooo
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.
Depends on the problem. For design and architecture level, sometimes even data structures, a physical whiteboard is still king.
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.
I told them if they have a Gmail account, just use the + addressing feature, otherwise, just create a Gmail account.
If they couldn't get a login reset sent to their email, then that's broken. If they have to create a new email account just for you, that's bullshit, too.
If they couldn’t get a login reset sent to their email, then that’s broken.
How is that in any way relevant to the situation I am talking about, though?
If they have to create a new email account just for you, that’s bullshit, too.
While I would agree, that also seems irrelevant to my situation. Tell you what, seems like there are some misunderstandings, miscommunications, and/or incorrect assumptions being made here. Rather than me having to completely rewrite what I wrote previously based on guesses about where those misunderstandings may lie and which incorrect assumptions are being made, let's just schedule a quick call.
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
Fuck no
I need traceable communications
Send me an email, I don't want to discuss potentially non contract and policy approved things over a medium that won't record it
People, keep your communications traceable at all times
It almost never is. Plus I probably have to write the info down anyways so just send me a text. If you have to call to explain it, I'll call you.
work related: no. personal: no.
I didn't generally mind this quite so much ..
Then someone just could calls me without even texting first... While I'm already in a meeting actively taking to someone else...