Call Me, Maybe?

Call waiting. 

Busy signals. 

Collect calls. 

Try explaining any of those to a teenager. (I did. It was equal parts depressing and entertaining.) 

If you know what any (or all) of those are, then you’re old enough to have lived through the evolution of phones and the associated etiquette.

Back in the day, we used to wait by the phone for important calls. My brothers wouldn’t dare pick up the phone while I was waiting for a potential call from my high school crush for fear of getting their eyes scratched out. And when said crush called (hopefully!), I would twist the phone cord around three corners to hide in my closet and chat. 

I could sit on the phone for hours with a friend chatting about everything...and nothing. The angst of calling someone and having to speak to their parents was real. And then there were the crank calls (Seymour Butz and Moe Lester were crowd favourites).

Oh, how times have changed. We went from being tied to the telephone (literally, if the cord was long enough), to having the phone tied to us everywhere we go. At first, getting your own mobile phone was such a big deal (and such a big phone). And now talking on the phone is the big deal.

Lately, I’ve been noticing the anxiety levels I have around calling and answering calls...and it has nothing to do with speaking to someone’s mom. It may be partly due to my COVID-related exhaustion. After a day of sitting on Zoom, I’m at a loss for words. But I also feel like the rules of phone engagement have become murky and awkward.

For starters, now it seems you need to set an appointment to call someone. “Can I call you now?” has become foreplay before pulling the trigger. Then, there’s the countless back and forth required to schedule a call that could have likely been settled by a quick call! Same goes for long streams of texts. In the amount of time I’ve been typing (or anxiously staring at the ellipsis), words could have been spoken, problems solved, dates made. You catch my drift.

We’ve all experienced the misunderstandings that occur when texts get lost in translation (or lost completely). Whether it’s a misread tone, a mistaken use of an emoji (clearly Grandma didn’t know what the 🍆 meant when she asked what you ate on your date) or sending to the completely wrong person (I should wear always wear my glasses while texting. I’ve done this too many times), there’s a lot more room for error in the land of texting, most of which could be prevented by simply calling someone. 

But I’m getting sweaty even thinking about it. A while back I went on a few dates with someone who I was interested in getting to know more. (Dating in COVID times has a whole other layer of issues, but that’s for another time.) After as many text misunderstandings as we had dates, I told him that we would both do each other’s neuroses a favour if we moved some communications from texting to talking, to which he agreed. A few days later my phone rang and it was him. You know what I did? I freaked the f*ck out.

“Why is he calling me?” and “I bet he doesn’t want to see me anymore” were just two of the frantic thoughts racing through my head. For the first 10 minutes of the call, I probably sounded like someone who just got knocked in the head. I was dazed and confused and completely out of sorts. After the preliminary chit-chat, I was waiting for the classic “I need to talk to you about something…” (Insert death march here.) But the chit-chat simply led to more chit-chat. It was a pleasant catchup, no more, no less. And it was lovely. (Maybe the key to not getting ditched is to keep talking so they can’t say it!)

It seems we’ve become so reliant on our phones for everything except for actually speaking on them. Have you ever had a teenager laugh at you for leaving a voicemail? I have. Multiple times. But perhaps us older folks can teach them a thing or two about the art of the phone call. Maybe instead of the dizzying boomerang of texting, we can have conversations the old-fashioned way once in a while. In this age of social distancing, it’s a great way to connect (but if it’s Mike Rotch calling, I’m not answering).