Phones are just horrible

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Whenever the phone rings, I always hope it is someone who I know well and not some random person because I don’t like to talk on the phone with people I don’t know very well.

It’s hard to talk on the phone, it really is. It takes so much effort, but it takes less effort when you know the person very well. This is because you don’t have any visual clues. Visual clues are very important to communication, and I use them a lot.

I guess that’s part of the reason I don’t like to talk on the phone–I can’t use body language. When you use a phone to communicate you rule out a lot of visual signals that are important to communication.

And when you chat online with someone, you rule out visual and verbal signals. Tone of voice and inflections are important and they can’t be easily transferred through a computer. That’s why face to face communication is so important to us humans. It is easier to communicate that way.

I would rather talk to you in person any day than chat with you on the phone. Phones are just horrible. But sometimes they are convenient, and that’s part of why they are horrible.

Nonetheless, I am grateful for them. They help me keep in touch with my friends who live far away. If it weren’t for telephones, I would probably just forget all about them. I would maybe send them a letter every couple years, but not anything more than that.