I've gotten several e-mails in the past week or so from friends/acquaintances/colleagues that I haven't been in touch with for a few months. I wonder what it is that is floating around in the zeitgeist making people think, "Hey, I wonder what Wendy's up to?"

It's nice. It's also making me feel like a slacker. I used to be a fairly good snail-mail/e-mail correspondent, but I've been letting things slide. (I've never been good at telephoning people, but I do try to make an effort on behalf of those friends and loved-ones who prefer to communicate by telephone.)

I wonder what it is about telephones that makes them so strange. I remember that the first time I took one of those tests that tells you your Myers-Briggs personality type, one of the questions was "How many times to you let the phone ring before you pick it up?" Letting it ring a lot is apparently diagnostic of introversion. Though, if you were to ask me this question now, the answer would be complicated. I usually let my home phone ring until the answering machine picks it up. In the office, I answer the phone immediately, unless I'm currently having an important face-to-face conversation with someone, in which case I let it go to voice mail. If my cell phone rings, I check the caller ID: I answer immediately if it's someone I know or if I'm expecting a call; otherwise I usually let it go to voice mail.

I love my voice mail, but I hate talking to other people's. When I call people at work, I often write out a short voice mail script, so that if they're not in, I can avoid leaving messages like, "Hi, [co-worker], this is, um, Wendy...from, er, Tech Pubs. I have some, uh, questions about the, um, [Hideously Complicated Scientific Instrument]." ***long pause ensues as I try to decide if I want to explain my issues about how the user sets the voltage on the thingamajiggy. Eventually, I give up*** "Um, yeah, so give me a call when you get a chance. Uh, my extension is XXXX."

Suzette Haden Elgin, in her book, The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense at Work, says that it is much easier to tell if someone is lying when you speak to them over the phone than when you talk to them in person. The idea is that we use a lot of non-verbal cues when judging a person's trustworthiness, and that the hardest non-verbal cue for people to control, and therefore fake, is tone of voice. And since tone of voice is the only non-verbal cue you get in a phone conversation, you tend to focus very strongly on it. In a face-to-face conversation, body language often overshadows tone of voice.

Presumably, this also means that other verbal tics like saying "um" every five words are also much more apparent (an annoying!) when one speaks on the phone, which is why I'm trying to slowly train myself not to do that. (I think I "um" a lot more on the phone than I do in person. I think it's partly to compensate for the inability to pause, make eye contact, and check if the person on the other end of the conversation is getting what I'm saying. Though maybe if I recorded myself in conversation I'd find that I "um" just as much and I'm just not self-conscious about it.)

I usually only use the phone at work when I need a simple answer in a hurry. Simple or complex answers not in a hurry are better handled by e-mail; complex answers in a hurry are often better obtained face-to-face.

I actually think it would be very cool to try using instant messaging at work, but I don't think enought people at my company use it.

I learned to sound reasonably professional on the phone by imitating my father. This means that my voice goes down in pitch when I'm consciously in "business call" mode. This is actually probably a good thing - another thing Elgin points out in The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense at Work is that one of the subtle disadvantages that women have in being taken seriously at work is that women tend to have high nasal voices, and people associate high nasal voices with children.

(Not that I generally have a problem being taken seriously at work. In fact, I'm often surprised by how seriously I get taken - in many respects, I still feel like a kid fresh out of school, and I take a lot of my skills for granted. Other people don't take them for granted.)

I imagine that there are people out there who much prefer the phone to other methods of communication, and who probably feel the same way about writing a long e-mail that I do about making a phone call. (Actually, I know there are such people - presumably they're the ones who, when I send them an e-mail, phone me up to talk about it as soon as they get it.) Daniel told me recently that he spoke with someone who conjectured that using voice-recognition software to write would improve his writing, because "speech is more natural to humans than writing." My immediate response was, "It's not more natural to this human."

Alas, this human should probably stop writing now, and go make a couple quick phone calls.