Submitted by Paul T. Jackson.
The telephone rang. Then it stopped. That is, it didn’t ring a second time. I answered it anyway. I suppose a lot of people out of habit, get up from, or stop what they are doing at the first ring of the phone, like the service man, who, while you’re there in front of him trying to explain your car problem, interrupts you five times to answer the phone.
One wonders why a phone call should take precedence over everything else that might be going on. Perhaps it has to do with our upbringing or experience. We think the call may be from a friend in need, or an important business call, or a lost sale if it is not answered. In the case of the repair shop, it’s probably the prospect of new business, rather than the threat that the person who is already there might leave, that one answers the phone interrupting the paying in-house customer.
But it seems we all do it; answer the phone at the expense of a conversation. I once called my brother-in-law in Michigan at 9 pm my time here on the West coast, not realizing I was calling him on his time of 12 midnight. When he answered, I realized he had been awakened and I apologized profusely for awakening him. But he responded with, “That’s OK, I had to get up to answer the phone anyway.” When my sister called me, apparently at her time of 6am, I was still blithly asleep here at 3am.
We all seemed programmed to think of a phone ringing as utmost importance and that it needs to be responded to. Now that we have answering machines, we get up and try to beat the answering machine’s automatic pick-up. With voice mail available and the last number called ring back, one would expect a leisurely walk to the phone. But no! We haven’t been able to figure out how to use all the technology so we still rush to the phone. Some of us go into apoplexy if we discover the phone lines are down and the phone is dead. Or worse, we forget our cell phone. We can’t phone a friend, we can’t get calls and heaven forbid we might have to go next door or get in our car to find a working telephone. When we find a phone to call from, we generally call the phone company to tell them something they already know.
Once when our phone line was dead, I called from my cell phone and they treated it as a service call. The nice lady told me to go outside and plug the phone into the jack at the junction box to see if it worked, thus testing the outside line to see if the problem was the inside wiring. I went to the box in this very windy and rainy storm that had downed the outside line, unscrewed the cover and looked but found that there was no place to plug in a phone jack; it was an older box. It finally occurred to me that my portable line phone inside required an electrical outlet to allowing those types to work, something that was not available on the outside of the house in any case, where the phone box was. I also realized that even if there was an electrical box nearby, the storm had wiped out electricity as well. I finally realized that I had a reasonably good phone with connection; my cell phone, so I wondered, somewhat amused, why I was out there in the rain getting wet, worried about my phone service.
We not only answer ringing phones but seem to be dependant upon them and have a difficult time waiting for new or repair service.
I suspect the phone and cell phone is now so ordinary, common and familiar, that, to be without one or several, we feel we’ve been deprived of some inalienable right, which I understand the FCC has in fact indicated it is. I know I even feel that way about my Internet connection which is based on the telecom systems. There have been some court cases of denial of service and there are still places in mountains in the U.S. where there is no phone service, and some people rely on telephony or radiophone and CB. Even if we don’t think it’s a right, not having phones or not being able to call or be called for some reason, we are like the school youth currently without their cell phones and pagers. Many of us would feel disconnected from the world, and probably would be; so much so that we want phones immediately and we want to answer every ringing thing. Perhaps it’s an esteem thing, i.e. we count when we have many connections.
There used to be bosses who didn’t dial or answer their own phone. That was the secretary’s job. Now bosses take their own calls, mostly on cell phones, make their own calls, and check voice messaging and email after every period away from their desk, as well as leaving messages for the secretaries, administrative assistants and gofers. Sometimes when we can’t get connected, such as waiting for the “next available service representative” we need to have something like a “camp technology” so we can hang up and wait for a call back when an available representative answers our call, the sort of thing secretaries used to do for executives. The technology is called “Interactive voice response systems (IVR.) Actually, sometimes I wish there was a technology that would make them wait until I’m ready to pick up the phone. This reminds me of the comedian Roney Dangerfield who gets no respect; “I called 911 the other day and was put on hold.” On the other hand if we all used IVRs, would anyone be answering the phone?
Real connections, whether for self-esteem, emergencies, relationships, information or transaction, require real people relating to one another. Telephones seem to work really well regardless of the interruptions and frustrations caused by them.
Once connected together, we are communicating. Communications are two-way. According to the American Libraries Association President, Hope Tillman in 2001, “When communication takes place there is a shared responsibility on both the communicator and receiver…that they both have the same understanding,” One of our youth leaders said she could remember anyone’s name if she had the opportunity to introduce them five times. Another suggested that one had to repeat something seven times in a presentation before 80% of an adult audience “hears” the information. So connections are only the first step in eventual communication and understanding.
While I don’t remember the exact issue, one of my inmate workers was upset and we just did not understand each other and things got really upsetting for both of us. At some point just before he left the office, he said something that made me realized what he was saying; that we were arguing about two different things. I felt guilty that I almost lost a good worker simply because we did not at first understand each other.
Now we have an explosion of fast relatively cheap ways to make connections an communicate including phones, cell phones, Internet social networks, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and a host of cloud computing allowing us to share and communicate; sometimes so much that we are overwhelmed at this. Google has had to use new technology to collect and index pages as they increase and now is called “Caffiene,” a dynamic capture in real time of what goes up on the web. A spokesperson said, “If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine (just the index) takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.” And that’s only the online information we are creating. According to a 2010 R. R. Bowker study, 764,448 self-published and micro-niche titles came out in 2009. That’s more than twice the number—288,355—of traditional books published that year.
So anyone might wonder, if all we are doing is producing writing, books, and information0, who is really using listening, connecting to each other.
When traveling we do indeed represent the city we are from, the state we live in, the country from which we came, and the schools we have attended, our profession. So connecting with others is important in many respects in our different roles. Connections lead to discourse and discourse leads to understanding. In our efforts to get connected or re-connected, remember our shared responsibility; to hear and understand each other.
Connections lead to discourse and discourse leads to understanding. In our efforts to get connected or re-connected, remember our shared responsibility to hear and understand each other.
By Paul T. Jackson © 2002
