If you and I have ever had a conversation on the telephone, and during that conversation you started to get the impression that I was uncomfortable and wanted to hang up…you’re right. I absolutely, without question, wanted to hang up. Please don’t take this personally. It’s not you. It’s that I – like 90 percent of the population of the industrialized world – hate talking on the telephone.

It wasn’t always like this, you know. There was a time in my life – it was brief, somewhere between the ages of 13 and 19, I believe — when speaking on the telephone was a welcome diversion, being the only way to communicate with my friends outside of school. But email and, later, texting gave us alternatives to the telephone that were quicker and typically got us right to the point of whatever the discussion actually was, freeing us from the cord that shackled us to the wall or those afternoons where we would lie on the couch trying to find something to do to occupy our limbs while carrying on a conversation about who liked who in 8th grade social studies class.

This is not to say that there are no irrelevant text messages, of course. I would estimate that only 4 out of every 976,217 messages actually carry any information of significant consequence. But the fact that those messages only take seconds of our time rather than the minutes – with the threat that it may grow into hours – of a telephone call make such things far more palatable.

There’s also the fact that, as you get older, the odds of any telephone call being made to impart GOOD news erode dramatically. When my wife and I started dating we were in a long-distance relationship, and would often – nightly, even – have long conversations on the telephone. Since we got married and closed the geographical gap between us, I can count on one hand the telephone conversations that haven’t involved injury, illness, the death of a loved one, or catastrophic mechanical failure. That’s not just her, either. Virtually everybody I talk to on a regular basis – via text, as God intended – would never dream of actually calling on the phone unless it was Bad News. The ONLY phone calls we get anymore are Bad News, or “Potential Spam,” which is just somebody calling with the hope of infecting you with Bad News. Even if the call isn’t Bad News, it’s usually neutral at best. The closest thing to Good News I’ve gotten via telephone call in the last year is my son’s speech therapist calling to tell me that she’s going on vacation and has to cancel his appointment next week. 

We used to spend hours choosing our favorite songs to use as a ringtone. Now I’m afraid to use a song I enjoy as a ringtone, because I know that I’ll start to associate it with things that cause me anxiety, and the work of Mr. John Williams should never do that to anybody.

Then there’s the fact that when a phone conversation runs out of things to talk about, you are left awkwardly stumbling for some way to continue. Both people on the phone are concerned that it will seem rude of them to end the conversation, so you continue to babble about things of virtually no consequence just because you don’t want to cause offense. This problem is rarer when dealing with somebody else in person. When you’re interacting with another human being face-to-face, there is almost always some other legitimate reason for you to interact other than the conversation itself: you’re watching a game together, you’re at work, you’re buying a new pack of liners for your air fryer. When this happens, when the conversation begins to lull, you can always turn to whatever the reason is for your interaction in the first place: I can’t believe they threw a flag on that play, we should probably put a pin in this task and come back around to it after the holidays, and whaddaya MEAN the coupon is expired? 

Conversations that do not come with that sort of built-in justification for talking to a person can be chalked up to “hanging out.” In those cases, you’re either doing it with somebody who you are so comfortable with that you need no further justification to speak (such as my wife) or you can deal with it the way we do in the South, namely by slapping yourself on the knees and saying, “Welp, I shouldn’t take up much more of your time.” This last maneuver IS possible on the telephone, but without the knee slapping providing a visual cue, it’s a more complicated maneuver to execute.

So if you’re part of that tiny 10 percent of people who actually enjoy talking on the phone, I implore you, think about why you’re calling before you dial. Is this conversation something that can be dealt with in a text message or two? Is real-time verbal conversation actually NECESSARY? And if you decide that it is, that’s fine. But try to remember that not everybody feels that way, and don’t take it personally when you can hear their palms make contact with their jeans and they start the next sentence with, “Welp…”

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok.