Topic 76: Telephone Manners

Carol:

Call Waiting   

    
 I don’t like talking on the phone, not since my mother gave me an egg-timer to minimize talk time. I usually spent hours on the phone with friends who I had already spent hours with at school.  Until we got the egg-timer.   My mother’s rules were mostly about good manners when answering the call or taking and leaving messages. The egg- timer was to remind me that it was rude to keep the line tied up when someone might be calling other members of the family.  Since 99% of the calls were for me anyway, I didn’t really see the point. I was just being rude to myself, then, right?
 

When I went away to College, long distance was expensive and inconvenient.  Sunday evenings at the dorm, I would stand in line behind all the other girls, keeping a courteous distance from the wall phone that was not in a booth.  I didn’t need an egg-timer to make it brief. The body language of the next person in line did the job. The year I lived in France, no phone calls. Too expensive and too complicated,  not to mention the weird telephones and operators who couldn’t understand your accent.  My final year of college, we actually had our own phones in the dorm rooms.  Who would think that someone who hated to talk on the phone could rack up a $150 phone bill the first month? Let’s just say, I learned quickly to adopt the egg-timer approach to telephone conversations and to pay my part of the bill on time.
 

I really got to hate talking on the phone when I started work.  It began with the temp job Marc got me at a Palm Springs law office where he was working for the summer. I was instructed to lie to callers when a lawyer wanted to avoid a client. So, I was saying “I’m sorry, Mr. Law is in court on a big case, but I’ll see that he gets your message, “but I was thinking “I’m sorry, Mr. Law wants to avoid talking to you as long as possible, at least until he finishes another few cups of coffee.”   My next job required more advanced skills related to hitting the correct buttons in the correct sequence so as not to disconnect, interrupt or forget people at the four different phone numbers. My general ineptitude was offset by really polite phone manners.  “I’m sorry, Professor Yale, that I cut you off again.  Please hold while I try to get Dr. Harvard back on the line.” 
 

 Changing telephone technology calls for new rules of etiquette.  We don’t need egg timers around here because we all have our own cell phones and personal numbers. Our land line has caller ID and voice mail, so I don’t even have to answer the phone if I don’t feel like talking. No Call Waiting—bad manners.
 

 Regarding cell phones, my rules are simple: never talk loudly in public, don’t drive and talk, return voice messages promptly. Yesterday, my cell phone died on me…from under-use. After I recharged it, a message popped up on the screen. The message was from my husband (I do know how to retrieve voice mail)  from September.  He should know by now that I don’t like to talk on the phone.

Megan:

Telephone Manners

I really enjoy the topics on manners because they allow me to recycle older essays and adapt my three Golden Rules of Etiquette to almost any situation where politeness is required. Quick review of the Rules as they were applied to company and ancestors:

Be Clean
Accept Food or Drink
Do not overstay your welcome.

How can these be applied to the phone, you ask? Well, some of it is common sense, and some of it is quite a stretch, but I didn’t sleep well last night and I’m too tired to come up with new rules. Plus there are tons of normal guides online, especially concerning when and where it is appropriate to use mobile phones. Let’s not rehash that here.  

Be Clean:
The other day, the phone rang. Person A (names have been changed to protect the guilty) answered the phone and then shouted for Person B. “Person B, it’s for you.” 

To which Person B shouted back, “I’m on the toilet.”
Person A: “So what should I do?”
Person B: “Pass it around the door.”  

This all went on without covering the mouth part, or muting the phone so the caller must have been horrified to hear what he was getting in for. But just in case he hadn’t heard, Person B flushed while still on the phone.
People, as convenient as it may seem, don’t talk on the phone while you are on the toilet. Not every call has to be taken immediately. That is why God invented Caller ID, Voicemail, and little pads of paper upon which can be inscribed the details of a message.

Except Food or Drink (haha, see what I did there? It’s a pun.):
Most phone etiquette guides will tell you that talking on your cell phone in a restaurant is a no-no (same goes for toilet talk). I propose we go a step further and don’t talk on the phone while eating at all. There’s a reason it's rude to talk with your mouth full, and it’s not just because everyone can see your chewed up food. It’s also much harder to understand you, doubly so over the phone because reading lips and facial expressions is impossible.
Also, it’s not nice for the caller to hear the crunching and chewing sounds amplified and projected directly into the ear. 

Do not overstay your welcome:
Some people don’t like to talk on the phone, and others are content to do it for hours. This can make getting off the phone tricky.  In this house, Person A really hates using the phone. She hates it so much that when she has finished what she has to say, she sometimes overrides the caller with “Ok, nice talking to you, I’ll let you go” and then hangs up without hearing the other person.  She did this to me while I was in England a lot, but I just called back again and was like, ”Dude. There’s a reason I was calling.” It’s less important to be polite to your parents.

When I run out of things to say, and so has the person I am talking to, there can often be an awkward silence. I’ve learned it is easier not to pussyfoot around with “Umms” and “Uhhs” and “How is your family?” for the 5th time. Instead, I just get to the blunted point: “I don’t have anything left to say.”
Other person: “I guess… neither do I.”
Me: “Good phone call.”
Other person: “Um… what?”
Me: “Bye.”