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.
Hello otacon239, thanks for contacting lemmy technical support. My name is tja, I love dogs and I will be thrilled to help you today. I understand that you dread email troubleshooting because it will take two weeks and 13 exchanges to actually start troubleshooting, is that correct?
COMPUTER NOT WORK!!! FIX!!!
Hello otacon239, I understand that this is not what you expected and when a computer doesn’t work can sometimes get frustrating. My dog sometimes misbehaves and I also find it unacceptable. I’ll be happy to help you with your problem. Could you provide me the computer logs, electricity bills, last tax declaration, birth cirtificate in long form with 3 copies and the proof of Fermat last theorem?
Microsoft
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
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.
Y’all don’t talk?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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
Me: yes
Me after the call: “could you send a summary of what we discussed?”
I’ll even slip in a passive aggressive, “this is why I prefer emails” or, “maybe next time you can just send me this”
My hero 🫶
I’m gonna want a paper trail, so let’s just cut out the middle step and do it by email from the start
“This meeting could have been an email. That I accidentally deleted.”
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.
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.
I often end up being a rubber duck.
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.
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.
Or like, you know, focus for a second and read the message instead of seeing text and responding only to first sentence, if not just the title xD
“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.
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.
