Entries with tag "telephone"

When you call someone on the phone, after identifying yourself, do you go right on talking, or do you stop and give them a second to process that and acknowledge you? Lately I've been doing the latter, since I know I tend to talk fast, and when you first pick up the phone you usually aren't concentrating and giving it your full attention and ready to process things. But when I say "Hey, it's Dan," and then pause, people always seem to go, "...Hi," as if they were expecting me to keep talking and are surprised they're expected to respond before I actually communicate anything. So I'm puzzled and I wonder what other people do.

I've always hated talking on the phone, mostly because telephonic conversation seems to consist mostly of accidentally talking over each other and having to stop and say "sorry, what?" To me this seems like a flaw inherent to the design of the telephone; you can't see the other person, so you have no indication when they are about to start talking. Online chatting lacks this feedback as well, but the software enforces serialization and cleanly puts the messages one after the other. Talking on the phone is sort of like chatting with a program that prints the messages as soon as you type them, even if the other person sent something at exactly the same time. That kind of conversation would have exactly the same problems. So with such a critical design flaw, I just don't understand how the telephone has gotten so popular. It seems like it should have been a flash in the pan invention that quickly fizzled, like the pogo ball.

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