Emails Rool, Phones Drool

I hate the phone. I really do. I never really liked it, but now that email has arrived, I use the phone very little. I might be of a minority on this issue.

Of course, normal people live for their phones nowadays. Most people need little else in life, because their phones also take pictures and send text messages and open cans and cut down trees and sautee mushrooms and compliment your outfit and then thank you for the pleasure. I finally broke down about a year ago and got my first real cell phone. It does none of those things, as far as I know. It might do backflips, for all I know, but I'm not really interested.

Email is a about a thousand times better as a method of communication. I express myself better in written form than verbally, so that's probably a large part of my bias.

But you can't argue with the convenience of email. You can email someone any time, day or night, whenever it strikes you that you should. With the phone, you can't call earlier than a certain time in the morning or later than a certain time at night. You shouldn't really call during meal hours because people usually don't want to be interrupted then. People with jobs really don't have the time to talk to you during the work day. In the end, you're left with a window of about an hour or so each day when you can actually reach someone. You can always leave a message those other times, but then you're locked in a long, tedious game of phone tag.

But most of the time, when I want to communicate something, I don't need an actual conversation anyway. I just need to impart some information. I don't need to go through the whole rigamarole of regular conversation. "Hi." "Hey, how's it going?" "Good, how are you doing?" "I'm good, how's the wife?" "The wife is good." "Hey I really enjoyed ..." and then you're off track.

Maybe in the midst of all this, you can actually squeeze in what you wanted to impart, but then even when you try to end the conversation, there's often another unecessarily laborious exchange. "OK, well, I should get going; I gotta ... um ... melt the cat." "OK, have a good time melting your cat!" "Will do." "And say hi to the wife." "OK, and you say hi to ... your momma, I guess." "Will do!", etc. etc. I guess what I'm saying here is that I don't like talking to people.

So even at work, I email instead of calling or going to someone's desk. It probably saves me a full work day of pointless chatter every week. But old people are horrified at this practice. They seem to think it's rude to email when you could call. "Just pick up the phone!" they say, exasperated. To which I wittily rejoinder, "Fuck you." I don't want to pick up the phone. Who determined that calling is more polite anyway? When you're calling someone, you're interrupting them. They can get and read your email whenever they're ready to. I think email is much more polite.

So there. And, fuck you.