When did we start hating phone calls?
I think I can trace it back to 1993. And it involves Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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As teenagers, my sister and I once ran up such a huge phone bill that our dad put a lock on the phone. And I mean a physical lock on the rotary dial so you couldn’t make any calls. Which worked until we figured out you could easily take it off with a pair of our dad’s stamp tweezers. (Yes, my dad was a stamp collector, a fact entirely at odds with everything else about him. Yes, you need tweezers for stamps. No, we didn’t become professional lock pickers.)
I used to talk on the phone for hours, usually to friends that I’d just spent all day at school with. I can’t even begin to think what we were talking about. We also used to call up chat lines, where you could talk to strangers on the phone. For fun! I just think there was less to do in those days.
I don’t even talk to my best friends on the phone now, let alone strangers.
And I know I’m not alone in this as I’ve seen Instagram posts of things like, ‘Sorry I missed your call, I was staring in horror at the screen wondering why on earth you couldn’t just text me’, which get hundreds of thousands of likes.
As a Gen X-er, it now feels unthinkable that for around half my lifetime, voice calls were the main way of staying in contact AND when you answered a call you had no idea who was there. Every time you picked up the phone was a gamble over who it could be and whether you wanted to talk to them. And this happened multiple times a day.
I haven’t done the research but it wouldn’t surprise me if there had been some correlating increase in risk-taking behaviour to compensate for this loss of adrenaline in our lives.
But when did this fear of talking on the phone start? When did my immediate reaction to receiving a phone call become fear that it could only be news too bad to be conveyed by text?
And that’s one reason I don’t call anymore. I don’t want to scare anyone. But I also worry about it being a bad time to intrude upon their day. It feels a bit, ‘Put everything else down, I’m here now’.
Obviously, the advent of texting changed everything. Surely that’s when we slowly began falling out of love with voice calls. Text messages started being widely used in 1999 and by 2001 newspapers were reporting that teenagers were using their phones more for texting than talking.
There were no dire warnings at the time that this new method of communication would supersede voice calls though. My reaction to first learning of the existence of texting was very similar to that of President Rutherford B. Hayes on being introduced to the telephone and saying, “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?”.
I was wrong. And texting has taken over and made many of us horrified at the idea of talking on the phone. But for me, there was also a phone incident that may have triggered the gradual landside into my mute communications.
It’s Christmas at my parent’s house. They’ve gone out leaving me and my sister alone. (It’s not Christmas Day, don’t worry.) I’m eighteen, which is embarrassingly old for what happens next.
The phone rings and I answer it. I wouldn’t dream of answering anyone else’s phone now but this is 1993. Different times.
On the other end of the line is a man asking for my dad. I tell him he’s not in. And the man says, “Okay, please can you tell him that Arnold Schwarzenegger called.”
My mind is completely blown. Why is Arnie calling my dad? My brain is racing through all the possibilities. Are they friends and my dad just never mentioned it? This feels unlikely as he met the boxer Henry Cooper just once and has a large framed photo of this occasion in the living room. Maybe Arnie’s buying Southend United and he wanted to talk to their number-one fan about what to do with the club. Or had he heard about my dad’s recently grown rat’s tail (I’ll come back to this another time, I’m sure) and wants someone sleazy-looking to star in his new movie?
None of these feel very plausible. I’m in a state of shock. So I just tell Arnie that I’ll let my dad know and put the phone down. I stand there bewildered, breathing in the plasticky scent of the artificial Christmas tree.
At this point, my sister comes into the room. I can hardly get my words out but I manage to shakily say, “Abigail, Arnold Schwarzenegger just rang up for Dad.”
“What?” she replies, with what can only be described as a note of disbelief mixed with disdain. “He can’t have. Did he have an Austrian accent?”
“No, it was more American.” It’s only as I finish saying this that any kind of doubt begins to grow.
“Well, do you not think it might have been Dad’s American cousin Arnold Schwarz?” asks my sister. The disbelief has now gone and she’s now fully 100% disdainful.
Ohhh. Yess. Okay. To be fair to me, I had no idea that my dad had a cousin called Arnold Schwarz. Surely I would’ve remembered this. It would’ve been like him having cousins called Harrison For or Mel Gib or Sylvester Stall.
“Yes, it might have been him,” I said, wondering how and why my brain had heard Arnold Schwarz and added ‘enegger’ on the end.
She’d made an excellent point and it was a more plausible alternative to Arnold Schwarzenegger putting on an American accent, calling up a man in Essex out of the blue and shortening his surname to Schwarz.
I did get to enjoy about twenty seconds of my life where I genuinely, stupidly thought Arnold Schwarzenegger had phoned my dad. But at the expense of the rest of my life feeling humiliated and happy never to answer the phone again.
Topics to discuss:
“I’ll never use the phone again”. What incident put you off for life?
“My dad’s cousin has a better name than Arnold Schwarz.”
“That’ll never take off.” Which popular invention did you initially dismiss?
After I left primary school in 1988, a classmate who went to a different secondary school and who I wasn't even my best friend during those primary school years would occasionally call me for a chat probably once a year. I had no problem with this. Some time in late 1995, he unexpectedly turned up at my parents' house. We chatted, and in passing I mentioned I was getting a PC for the first time in a few days as well as a game called Championship Manager 2. Big mistake. He turned up (uninvited again) on the day I got the PC and waited for me to set it up so we could play the aforementioned game. He did this regularly over the next few months, always uninvited apart from once when he called late on a Saturday asking if he could come over to play the game, when I said 'no, it's late' he actually said the words 'please, I beg you!'
It got so bad my mum even spoke to me in Greek when he was there (which she never did at any other time) asking when he'd leave or telling me to get rid of him. Then he got his own PC, I 'lent' him the game and didn't hear from him for a long time (and never got the game back).
A couple of years later he started calling again, and after too many calls in a relatively short period of time, I decided I had to cut him off completely. All I had to do was add his mobile number to my contacts and just not answer when he called. Unfortunately he's one of those psychopaths who seemingly gets a new mobile number every time he gets a new phone (what kind of person does this? I've had the same number for nearly 30 years!), so it was impossible to know if a call from a new number was him (which it sometimes was) and I ended up with 5 different numbers for him in my contacts. That's when I resolved to never answer a call from a number that isn't in my contacts ever again, all in a bid to avoid a single person. If it's an important call such as a bank or hospital, surely they'll leave a voicemail?
For the last 25 years, whenever I see a call from a new number, I'm convinced it's him!
There are other things he did in his desperate attempt to come over to play this computer game before I gave him my only copy but this is already quite long so I'll leave them out!
So firstly, "It would’ve been like him having cousins called Harrison For or Mel Gib or Sylvester Stall." just made me laugh so hard I cried. Thank you for this. Please call me Zena Bir from now on, I like it ;-)
My phone story which still makes me shrink a little to this day was when I lived in a big shared house for the first time. One of my housemates had a French Canadian friend staying with them. She was called Stephanie Vezina. One evening I answered our shared landline (the source of so many phone bill arguments every month!! Pre-mobile phone life phone bills were shared, how did we do that??) A man's voice with a very nice French accent asked
"Please may I speak to Stephanie Vezina?|
I heard, 'Stephanie OR Zena'
So I answered "yes, speaking."
He said "No, Stephanie Vezina."
I said "Yes, Zena." (still only hearing the OR)
He said "Stephanie VEZINA"
To which I just heard and even more emphatic OR ZENA.
We carried on in this vein, both getting more and more frustrated and bewildered until he hung up. I was so perplexed as to what on earth had just happened. I remained confused until breakfast the next morning when I was telling Stephanie that a French man had called for either her or me, but that he didn't have anything to say other than our names. That's when I learnt her surname. And that her dad had called.