Send the email, then call me to say “hey I sent you an email that I really need you to read and respond to urgently, I’ll let you go so you can focus while reading, talk later”

For one of my 3 jobs, I don’t have regular work hours, I’m employed just 5 hours a week, on call, for IT support for a little non for profit.

My contract, my email signature, my numerous discussions with the team all state “if you require a response within the same business day, please phone me to alert me to the issue”

I check my email once a day, I don’t have time to be checking it several times a day when I’m only paid for 5 hours work, I need to conserve those hours for maintenance and support I’m not about wasting anybody’s time.

So if someone happens to email me after I’ve already checked my inbox for that day, I won’t see it until tomorrow. Hence, phone me, I want to work, I just need a way to alert myself that work is available for me, a text message will also suffice.

I realise this is asking someone to change the way they operate to make my job easier. But the number of times I check my email at 1pm, and there’s zero tickets, then the next day I check my email and I have 20 emails all from the same person from about 3-5pm all saying “hey I have an issue” “hey following up this is kind of urgent” “hey, are you even checking your emails?”…no obviously I’m sorry not, it would have saved you so much effort to send 1 text after 1 email as I requested than to send 20 emails, and I would have actually gotten the text in time.

I totally agree. I had it a few times in which someone calls me, rips me out of my thoughs, we discuss something, hang up and I have nothing retained from what we talked about. Or, even better, someone says something on a call and I do that and then they never said anything about that.

Even worse, I can’t listen to the conversation in 1-2 weeks because that is the time I could actually work on it and remember every detail that we talked about.

Now I am strictly going with emails. Sure they can call me and we talk about the feasibility or discuss possible solutions but any request for implementation has to happen either over an email of which I then create a ticket/issue or they create one directly themselves.

That way I can prove that what I implemented was based on what was requested and if that was wrong then the request wasn’t clear enough.

There’s a reason debt collectors refuse to deal via email.

Non- refudiation is golden.

That’s why I hate text and mail cause someone can use it against you and also with a call you can sufficiently enact some impression by subtle tone modulation and tempo.

Text is just text hard to convey any emotion, sarcasm or a joke. I cannot read anyone’s mind through text

We’ve come full circle back to pagers.

I’m sure I’ve still got mine in a drawer somewhere

My inbox with >1000 inread emails says otherwise. You want something from me? Call me. Emails are just for meeting notes and other information for archival. Fuck every single one asking me to do something via email.

Instant messaging is the absolutely worst by the way. Nothing is archived and its way less efficient than a quick call.

The “nothing urgent” almost always gets left out and I end up a ball of anxiety from it. Just give me some details on what to expect. fuck.

Rude where? Totally normal here.

Annoying thing is the phone system they use to divert your call. It feels almost intentional to get us not to speak to a representative.

I AM old and fuck calls…

But I’m not a good meter, burned out early on tier 1 helpdesk and am a hermit by nature.

I was in the “I hate calls” camp when I was younger, but I have realized that a call takes way less time than an email chain or texts. Also, it is extremely gratifying to tell someone to fuck off on a call, especially a scammer.

I think this kind of problem is more exhibited in millennials who grew up on online chat and message boards. For younger Gen Zs who basically live on Discord, there’s less apprehension about calling someone. Face-to-face communication is another story for those Gen Zs, though.

I’m not weird. You’re weird.

Haha agreed. You don’t have to go back and forth over several hours or days to sort an issue out when you call. You can just hash it all out over the phone in a fraction of the time, and be on your way.

Oh well, to each their own.

Nah, the commitment in time on a call is unknown. I know I can fire off an email in under a minute. A call? That might take a few minutes. I’ll only call if I absolutely need an immediate response. Otherwise? Eat shit. I’m not getting roped into phone calls.

If you’re getting a call, the “huge goddamn problem” better be “time”.

Because human brains aren’t supposed to be able to do emotional and mental parkour like completely redirecting our focus on a new topic in under a second without prior warning.

For me personally, if it’s a call I expect, it drops the anxiety levels by considerable amount. Even better, if I can prepare a plan/scenario for the call, and take notes during it.

Of course, if it’s someone from my close family or friends, that also helps. But unexpected calls from unknown numbers (or known, but from like work or distant acquaintances) freak me out.

For me, I think it’s the fact that I have to prepare for both a social interaction and a monologue depending on whether they answer or not. As someone with mild social anxiety, the uncertainty and the fact that I am unequivocally initiating the interaction messes with a lot of the ways I would cope with joining a normal social interaction and throws me off my game

I got a lot better at phone calls when I worked on trauma therapy. I’ve always had issues asserting myself and phone calls are sort of a form of saying “hey!! Quit what you’re doing and pay attention to me because I have something important!” which isn’t something I was used to doing or asking for nor did I even think anything I did was important

Then you call the phone number and its a “helpful” voice chat bot you have to tell your problem to and hope it directs you to the right directory in their convoluted phone tree

They don’t give an email option, as then it would instantly become a ticket and they have to work on it. They prefer you gettig frustrated with the bot or the phone menu, and givng up

I think the bottom line is that you need to meet people where they’re at. I understand the part about audio issues and I feel like it’s exasperated because of the low audio quality from mobile phones or earbuds. At work, I really have to work at hearing people who use airbuds, especially if they’re male Indians.

Conversely, I will read a well-written email or text and to the thing that it’s saying, then get a reply that I did it all wrong and realize that I completely misunderstood it. I read it again and then my original reply and can’t figure out how I got it all wrong. If they tell me something, however, I’ll remember it completely and accurately. Also, I have to write everything down in order to remember, but I never need to look at my notes. I must have some loose wires.

Until you get a message that says just “server is not working”. Which one? Not working how? Who the hell are you, name@gmail.com?

How do you even respond to that? Unless you want to sound like an ashole, and spend an hour exchanging messages, you have to call back. I hate it so much!

Do you write long emails? If you are like me, you write clear, detailed emails that nobody reads.

In business at least, most people treat emails like text messages. If they are too long, their level of comprehension goes down.

Text messages and emails allow the recipient to handle them on their terms. You can pick them up when you are not doing something else, you can re-read them, you can lookup information, you can put thought on a reply. A phone call will interrupt whatever the recipient is doing and put them on the spot.

Anxiety bro

You must not have anxiety. It is almost debilitating sometimes for me to be on the phone. Text or email? No problem. In person, eh depends on how much of my social battery is left, but I can make it work most of the time.

But something about phone calls just doesn’t jive with me. I am at minimum pacing a marathon while on the phone.

Neurodivergent people struggle with body language and social cues at the best of times, but they’re still valuable tools to get through a conversation. Take that away and suddenly conversations become 1000% harder

Often an immediate resolution of a problem is not possible so I will have to say I will have to check it out. Talk to someone else and get back to the person who called me. Etc. My actual work is interrupted and may not be done that day.

Thanks for calling, it’s probably some shit you misconfigured in your browser.

Honestly that was the norm pre-COVID at my office.

So glad that ended.

Are you my landlord?

The place where I’ve worked for the last year and a half has been kind of rebuilding the whole product development team (including supporting cast like product and project managers) and using agile, etc.

So while we have some meetings, like daily stand-ups and the sprint planning & retrospective, for the most part they actively try to keep us engineers out of them. We get to work on the stuff that we’re supposed to work on, and all these other players work together to figure out what we should work on next without needing us there.

It’s a god dammed revelation! The engineers get to work on bugs and features rather than like at my last place where it was a mix of project management, financial justifications, inter-department meetings, scheduling, chasing people for stuff we need, and putting out fires on the production floor. Oh and then engineering shit every now and then.

Different types of roles, but still.