When the phone rings it’s no fun anymore

I used to love getting phone calls. It was a regular occurrence and one filled with expectation. Whoever was calling me would have something interesting to discuss with me, after all.

Then the world changed. Like many people around me, I haven’t had a landline for nearly a decade now. There’s just the mobile phone number to contact me on.

Offices went quiet a while back. People use email to communicate because it’s less intrusive and can be dealt with at a time to suit the receiver. Now that’s fine, unless you want something and you don’t want to have to wait. That’s when a text followed up with a phone call comes in useful. But too often we hit send on the email and then forget to track back and chase things. The phone call can be really helpful at these times.

But for a while now, most of the calls I get are from people I don’t know about something I don’t want and didn’t ask them for. The blight of call centres cold calling means that I have stopped answering phone numbers that I don’t recognise. If they really want to speak to me they will leave a message. And of course, if they want to speak to me about Payment Protection or some industrial / car accident I didn’t realise that I had been involved in but where I could claim compensation – well then they don’t leave a message do they!

It used to be such fun answering the phone – but now it’s just annoying when it rings and I see that I have a call from Manchester, Nottingham, Newcastle, Leeds or even Gambia, Canada and the USA. It’s never as exciting as I think it might be. And the conversation always ends with a “sorry, but I’m not interested. Yes, I know that doesn’t make sense to you, but I really am not interested.”

Also published on Medium.