Remedial phone etiquette

for the love of Pete

Good afternoon, this is Miss Tomlin of your telephone company with an important message about the proper usage of your instrument. We here at the Telephone Company encourage all of our customers to reach out and touch someone, but only with the correct protocol.

It has come to our attention that an alarming number of instrument users have never been taught, or have forgotten, how to deport themselves when placing telephone calls. As your instructress, we are going to re-learn some lessons that will make telephonic communication more pleasant and productive!

There is an implied threat there, yes, you’re so clever for getting it (snort)! You people have gotten so rude it’s taking all my self-control not to come to your residences personally and rip your instrument from your perma-claw hands and feed it to you for lunch [fiddles with décolletage].

1. A telephone call is by its nature an intrusion. A mild intrusion, and one that we have normalized, yes. But it is an intrusion, and it behooves ladies and gentlemen to remember this and comport themselves with that awareness.
   
   When you place a call, you are causing a distant electronic instrument to interrupt someone else. Your ringy-dingy is an actual ringy-dingy (or a vibration, which sounds pretty un-American to me, but ah, youth!) that sounds within your callee’s home.
   
   That is, you are requesting a favor. You are asking for someone else’s time. You, the caller, are in the supplicant position. It is yours to ask, not to demand.

2. Don’t ask the person you are calling to identify themselves before you give them the courtesy of identifying yourself. This is so basic that it should be natural to any person with manners.
   
   Dust your convolutions off and recall those lessons from mother. This is the kind of “modern” phone call that has become “normal.” It shouldn’t be.
   
   Phone rings.
   
   Josh: Hello?
   
   Caller: Um. . is this Josh?

The caller is asking a favor (time, attention right now) of the callee. The caller doesn’t get to demand that I identify myself first. The courteous approach is to introduce yourself. Here’s how phone calls used to be until about 2007:

Rrrrrrrrrrrrring!

-Hello?

-Hello. My name is Doug Smith and I’m calling from Burlington Dental. May I speak to Josh, please?

I still place phone calls this way, and would appreciate receiving them this way, too.

It is rude and entitled (even if that is not the intention) for a caller to reverse this. The caller is not a “customer”, and the person they are calling is not their subordinate.

It is 2023. That means it’s unusual for people to pick up the phone, a reversal of how it was in my youth. In those days, one answered the phone nearly universally. Today—and I approve of this new protocol—the phone has been put back in its place. The Victorians objected to the telephone in the home, because it is obnoxious to have a clanging bell (or today, an electronic ditty) that has the power to interrupt you in your private sphere at any time of the day or night.

So, today, you are lucky that a person picks up the call and gives you his time sight unseen. The very least a caller can do is to remember that it is the caller who has to justify the intrusion. It is not the callee’s responsibility to start answering queries to an unidentified person.

Now then, this concludes our lesson . . hang on. . . Phoenicia if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times not to interrupt. . .yes I. . just pull the plug on her account. . Phoenicia I’ll get to you in a minute. . . [nostril flare]

As a special reinforcing incentive for students, Vito from Installation and Line Repair will join us for lunch tomorrow in the commissary to demonstrate the consequences of failing to deport yourselves like ladies and gentlemen. Bring Band-Aids and an ice pack.