Phone étiquette

I want to take a moment and publically apologize to the caller who identified himself as the “dishwasher installer” and who had misdialed and ended up with me on the other end of the line. I have caller id, and this phone call was labeled “cell user” or something of that sort. I was expecting a call from a friend and thought that it might be her. Instead it was a man who very politely identified himself immediately, and was not familiar to me. I asked him whom he was trying to reach, and he gave me my exact phone number except that it was off by one digit. Which I told him and then proceeded to hang up while he was still apologizing for the mix up.

That’s when I realized that I had just hung up on him. In the ensuing silence, I did some soul searching. Why was I in such a hurry to get off the phone with this man? Was something burning on the stove or in the toaster? No! I’m becoming exasperated with phone calls coming from people who want to sell me something, and phone calls coming from recordings. I am becoming very frustrated with my life being interrupted by a device that used to serve a social purpose and now seems to serve almost exclusively a commercial one.

I was also exasperated because coincidentally my cell phone – a device I seldom use – which had previously arrived by mail from our cell company with the requirement that we use it and dispose of the older one, this very cell phone which had been imposed upon me with no consultation from me, was refusing to charge because the USB plug was damaged from overuse. The USB plug was damaged from overuse because this new replacement phone, imposed on me by the cell phone company,  required constant charging since it wouldn’t hold its charge for very long. The phone it had replaced could hold a nice long charge, and had other nice advantages as well.

My overall exasperation with phones might explain why I am losing the very phone etiquette the dishwasher installer had when he apologized for dialing the wrong number. The old land line serves no purpose but to annoy me with phone calls from people I don’t want to talk to or can’t talk to because they're on a recording. The rare times that a real human that I do want to talk to ends up on the other end of the line, I am almost surprised that they are actually there.

Pretty soon we will all have abandoned our land lines and switched over entirely to cell phones. I can consider myself one of the fortunate ones, having lived to see the rotary phone -- the index finger working the dial, the ear hearing the long and short sounds depending on the number--  replaced by the push button phone -- oh what fun and what speed! “Speed” is a relative concept, especially for someone who felt the excitement of replacing a rotary phone with a push button one.  

Sadly, I have capitulated to the smart phone marketing giants, since I needed to replace the flip phone that wouldn’t charge. I could have resisted the urge, and behaved like a Twenty First Century Luddite by asking for another flip phone. But it seems that everybody has a smart phone now, and the smart phone does present advantages. For instance, while traveling in the middle of Vermont, I borrowed my daughter’s iPhone and was able to respond to an email from my husband who was stranded at a European Airport because of an air traffic controller’s strike. Furthermore, my fellow Luddites might face the day in the not too distant future when they too will be forced to switch to a Smart phone, and flip phones will be added to the ever growing mountain of discarded rotary, push button and cordless phones.

(I do worry though that, during prolonged power outages, our cell phones will cease to work because they will have lost their charge, and with land lines a thing of the past, the old land line phone which used to work beautifully during power outages will no longer provide that much needed connection to the rest of the world). 

What is astonishing is that not only is my phone etiquette being eroded by the new association I make between the ringing of the phone and the likely uselessness of the call, but my faith in the “wonderfulness “ of the market place is being eroded as well, as the “free” market is slowly shifting into a dictatorship of goods whose built in obsolescence has increased exponentially.

Oops, excuse me, I need to get this call…I hope it’s my friend. In any case, I’ll try to be extremely polite.