BUT, most of the time phone calls are a power play. Sales people love phones because they are an opportunity to brow-beat and manipulate, I try not to hold back being just as rude in return. As the lawyer above notes, the other reason to use the phone is deniability, again, sales people love them because there’s no paper trail.

I frequently email vendors with something like, “can you send me the following specs for models xyz and abc, and a price quote on each with and without delivery to the following address?”

The reply, “Call me at the following number…”

I *never* call them, they just told me all I need to know about their product and their company.

1) It’s the NYT!?! For the most part, its readers are libtard twits. Even more ditto its commenters.

2) These things run in phases, or are overblown. Remember them regretting the demise of the long letter via snail mail? Now that that’s had time to sink in… is it really, really missed? Or has e-mail combined with things like blogs actually done the job much better by allowing much more “to-point” conversations?

I also hate voice mail, mostly because people have a tendency to spit out something garbled in a hurry and hang up. Have you ever listened to how most people leave their phone number? There have been many times at work when I’ve had to listen to a message 15 times just to get the callback number (it’s often different from the number in the phone’s call log), and I often have to resort to asking my coworkers to listen to the message for me.

A phone call is the only way to have a conversation, but for tons of basic ‘let’s go to the pub’ casual contact stuff email, texts or facebook is both easier and more polite.

IMO texting is too impersonal and truncated. Leave me a voice mail message and I’ll get back to you. Text me and I’ll ignore you.

As someone with most of the emails she and her now husband exchanged while he was on the far side of the world and in the middle of the ocean, I must of course disagree that email doesn’t measure up!

I think that both emotional attachments and manner of communicating are important in what forms of communicating one likes best– I think I mentioned up top, my family does a lot of touching and gesturing. That doesn’t work on phone, except as comic relief in the form of “… you can’t see it, but I’m waiving my arms around to show you how big it was.”

Not sure if that response was directed at me, but yes, of course our family does thank-you notes. I say notes, not letters.

That’s different than receiving a long, newsy letter from a friend.

My kids understand the importance of thank-you notes (even if I have to harangue them to do it) but their generation simply doesn’t get the letter thing. Literally or figuratively. And that’s a shame.

My husband and I had a long-distance relationship for a couple of years before we were married (mid 80s) and I treasure our letters from that era in a way that I don’t think email or texts could ever compare.