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A little phone etiquette to start the day.

Let me start the conversation with an honest and direct observation – we don’t use the telephone nearly enough and this has greatly reduced our personal connectivity, and that is a shame. This problem was remarkably impacted by Covid and five years later the aftereffects are not only felt but compounded along the way.

This shouldn’t be news to us, but far too many of us are content with texting as a total substitute for communicating, as opposed to by phone or God forbid, direct one on one physical conversations. This needs to change.

In lieu of the all-important face to face interaction, I suggest that you start picking up the phone and calling friends, allies, and family members that you can tolerate and even coworkers and clients. Nothing can replace a good ole fashioned conversation between two people.

As I stated before, Covid has somehow normalized texting and validated it as an official and acceptable means of communication. News flash – it isn’t an acceptable mode of communication, and it is a major problem, and  if we continue to rely upon this as our primary means of communication within our community, we will continue to lose real contact with the rest of the world.

And another thing, and I think Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson can be put to good use here,  using text messages will invariably cause something to be lost in translation. The real problem with texting is that texting doesn’t allow the luxury of denoting humor, sarcasm, snark, or any emotion and far too many wars have started with a simple miscommunication.
Moving on, when we do place a telephone call or receive a call, there are some basic ground rules.

I shouldn’t have to give a tutorial about good manners to observe on the phone, except one – be absolutely crystal clear as to whom you are talking to or who else is privy to that conversation. Absent a friendly incursion by the FBI or some law enforcement agency, you should not have to worry about anyone else listening in to a conversation. Ready for a shock—more times than not, when you think you are having that private one on one conversation, there are more than two parties participating. You would be surprised how many times you are in the middle of a private conversation, and you suddenly discover that you are on a speaker phone and others are in the background. Or how about when you call someone and after 15 minutes into that call you hear a cough in the background or a whispering from a third party?  Not cool. But again, this happens more than you think.

The takeaway is that it is entirely unprofessional and creepy if you are on a private call, and you don’t disclose the presence of a third party. It doesn’t matter if it is a co-worker, an intern, parent , child, or amazon delivery person, you must disclose always when you are on speaker phone and when a third party is within earshot of the conversation.

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