Honestly I think it’s wild people are so upset about this. Typing back and forth a ton of DMs sucks. Phone calls just get things accomplished. That’s my experience as a software engineer at least.
What phone calls accomplish is: that moment of “hold on I didn’t catch/understand that/i have a query” is immediate. Sometimes that’s better, sometimes that’s worse.
For it’s not so much that it’s going to be an unnecessary call than that the person just doesn’t want to collect their thoughts or (worse) doesn’t want to say what they want in writing. It’s usually going to be some ask that’s completely apart from anything I’ve been thinking about in the past 5-10 days, might be sketchy, and they apparently seem to think it’s urgent and/or nuanced, yet they’re just going to completely hold out on providing context and time that would let me be prepared for whatever pile of shit they’re about to dump on me.
If you can’t communicate it to me in a slack message or two, there’s a very real possibility that either you don’t know what you want, or that I can’t help you with it on a cold call.
9 times out of 10 it’s a stupid question that they could have typed into Confluence to get the answer though. I gatekeep all of these requests with
"Sure, I'm fairly busy now, but lets schedule something for a little later today when I have some time. In the meantime, can you put your question in the chat here in case I need to look something up? Thanks"
I guess I’m weird for preferring a 2-5 minute call over what would be 15-20 minutes of back-and-forth over text. 🤷♂️
I can literally feel myself deflating when I get these, like it’s a huge involuntary sigh accompanied by the classic heart-sinking…
…followed by a deep breath and a “Sure! 👍”
I work in municipal development. When I want to call you instead of emailing you, it’s because what I’m going to say is something pretty frank that you’d rather not have a written record of. You, Mr Civil Engineer, don’t want your client to do an Open Records request on me and find the email where I had to explain to you, in detail, that water flows downhill and that your drainage plan shouldn’t show water moving parallel to contour lines.
Yeah I just do it when I want to talk shit about someone and want it off the records, we get FOIA’d all the time, law schools are weird.
Yeah. Any time I want to talk off the record it isn’t because I’m trying to be sneaky and corrupt. I’m usually just venting or being super sarcastic.
No secret handshake deals occur over phone calls, but sometimes I’ll hold a “Come to Jesus” meeting with someone over the phone because I’m trying not to take them to court and tear down their house they built without a permit or inspections. I have to convince them with pretty frank language that I’m being nice when I’m trying to drag them through the process of having their plans reviewed and building inspected, and that if I stop hounding them it’s because we’re prepping warrants and injunctions and bidding out demo contractors.
Guess I’m just a chatty Cathy. I like the phone (as long as I somewhat like the person on the line).
Too many people of my generation worked the phone mines and I think the trauma has not healed
Texting feels like a sad proposition knowing a significant portion of the US population can’t read beyond the 6th grade level.
Avoiding my calls because verbal conversations make you anxious? Fair enough, I will spend an embarrassingly long time to write, re-read, delete, re-write, re-read several times, re-delete, re-write a third time by blending versions one and two, re-read and realize I didn’t explain something, re-write and realize that something else is irrelevant, re-read and realize it wasn’t irrelevant because two paragraphs later etc. until I have a message that can’t possibly be misread, send it, and then agonize about writing something that was misread until I hear back from you while pathologically refreshing my inbox.
Saying you can’t talk now but scheduling a time for me later? Totally fair, you have a whole ass job outside of my stupid problems, if they can wait I will wait and if they can’t I’ll go back to paragraph 1.
Avoiding my calls because you think I’m dumb but won’t just tell me how I’m being dumb so I can try to make improvements? Congrats, my new work project is making your work life a living hell until you either quit or schedule a call with me where we can discuss preferred communication styles and how to demonstrate mutual respect.
This is giving “can’t place your own order at the drive-thru vibes.”
I had that recently. The call and meeting “here’s x, can you do x?” Me: “yes”.
Was a bit crazy.
deleted by creator
