.. think again. Everyone who knows me knows of my disdain for using email for all of the wrong reasons: chat, negotiation, threats (”Your vice president is without service..”), back-biting, whining (subtly of course), debate and my personal un-favorite: one-up-manship. (i.e. “I will see your director cc: and raise you a VP”). Sigh. All of this can be avoided by simply picking up a telephone. You remember those devices right? Invented by Alexander Bell in 1876? Geeks are the worst. They hate confrontation and since every human communication can be seen as potential for confrontation they naturally avoid them and instead resort to the relative security and anonymity of electronic forms of communication. First we know all about the visual queues that are left out in email which of course gave rise to the so-called emoticons. But there are also audio queues such as long pauses, shifts in tone and the occasional deep breath. These are all subtle (and not so subtle) indicators of how your communication is being received or perceived by your listener (in full-duplex real-time I might add). All that is lost in blunt half-duplex forms of communication like email. Phone conversations it seems are dying particularly in the office setting. The genesis for this post came this morning as I read with interest this article in the New York Times aptly titled “The Office Phone Call Was Music to the Ears”. Here I will quote a part of the article that caught my eye:

“That brings up another reason the office phone call is worth preserving: there’s no ready substitute for practicing the necessary summoning of courage for potentially fraught encounters. Advancing in business is often a matter of gaining capacity for confrontation; to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever had to steel herself before sitting down to type a tough e-mail message.”

How often the phrase “Just pickup the **** phone!” is heard from my lips. As an Amateur Radio operation I am a communicator. I have been trained for it. It is instinctive for me to begin spelling by phonetics (”charlie-fox-echo-alpha-zero-niner-gulf” as a I relay a password over the phone to a user). Hams are trained in emergency communications to count words, spell uncommon words and use standard phonetics. authenticate the message. Repeat back only what is unclear for speed but also for accuracy. It is not our job to interpret only to relay is often told. So to be sure you must communicate clearly and effectively when using the phone, like email and other forms of communication there is plenty of potential for error and misunderstanding.

In summary I am one of the biggest proponents around for digital communications but even this old geek recognizes the need to just pickup the phone and talk to someone once in a while. On this 132nd anniversary of Bell’s discovery let’s resolve to make better use of it.