Category — DYDT

A few weeks ago, I asked a question about phone call lateness which raised a tangential question: do you always pick up the phone when it rings?

I’m always a bit surprised when someone answers the phone to tell me that they can’t talk.  Why didn’t they just allow voice mail to pick up?  Then we would have effectively accomplished the same thing: you would know I want to talk, I would know you can’t talk at the moment, you would call me back.  I don’t take it personally if I call someone, knowing they’re home, and they don’t pick up.  I just assume that they are busy inside the house.  Not everyone sits around, drumming their fingers on the table, waiting for me to call.

Plus, if it goes to voice mail, I can say what I needed to say.  If they pick up and say they can’t talk, I now need to go write down the question I was going to ask them so I still remember it when they call back.

This is obviously different from screening out phone solicitors.  I mean, I don’t pick up for phone solicitors at all, even if I’m not busy.  (I apologize, phone solicitors, but I will never buy something over the phone so it feels like a waste of your time too if I pick up.)  I don’t screen anyone else’s call though.  I pick up for everyone who isn’t a phone solicitor if I can talk.  So if I’m not picking up, it means that I can’t talk or I’m not home.

But some of the answers on that phone lateness post (and whether you turn your cell phone off at night) made me wonder if I was being rude by not picking up.  Was it better to pick up the phone and explain that I really don’t have time to speak?  Would people respect that and allow me to get off the phone immediately, or would they argue with me that the thing they had to say would only take a second?  There are times when I’m cooking when even a second is a second too long.

So, am I the only one?  Do you answer the phone when you can’t speak to tell the person you can’t speak, or do you allow it to go to voice mail/the answering machine and then call them back later?  Do you take it personally when you know someone is home and not answering?

Battlefish posed an interesting question to me a few weeks ago.  Her wristwatch broke, and it made her wonder how many people actually wore wristwatches anymore since phones (which tell the time) are so commonly in people’s hands nowadays.

I had to admit that my watch died last year, and I decided to stop wearing one.  The jeweler was replacing the battery when he informed me that the watch still wouldn’t start.  It was just too old.  While the parts could be replaced if I was willing to send it away (I wasn’t), I could buy a new watch for much less than what it would take to fix the current watch.  The current watch had sentimental value, and I would rather have an unusable watch in hand than risk possibly losing it but having it fixed.  So I went home and put my watch away.

I considered getting a new watch, and we looked at a few.  But I never found one that I loved as much as the one I was no longer using.  And then it started to feel redundant with the phone.  The phone was like always having a watch in my pocket; one that could hold hundreds of alarms throughout the day.  I couldn’t see spending money on something I clearly didn’t need.

So I’m now watch-free.  I’m also datebook-free (paper calendar was replaced by phone calendar), camera-free (I usually just use the camera in the phone), and book-free (sometimes I have a paper book with me, but usually I read whatever book I have loaded on the phone).  So I’m lighter.  But I also sort of miss my wristwatch.

Do you still wear a wristwatch, or do you use the clock on your phone?

Who was to know the future of the wristwatch when I begged my parents incessantly for my pink, plastic Swatch?

For anyone who say blogging can’t make a difference, I offer up my life because it sure as hell has changed mine.  And no, I’m not talking about publishing or the friendships I’ve made or meeting the president.  I’m talking about shaving my legs.

In the shower.

Until this blog post, I shaved my legs as a separate activity.  Sometimes I shaved pre-shower, but most of the time, I shaved at night and showered in the morning.  Big waste of water, big waste of time.  I hated shaving my legs and would often go days without doing it.  Hence why I would call shaving my legs after one of those periods of time “hacking through the forest.”

I decided to try this newfangled shaving-in-the-shower idea, and though it has taken me about two weeks to fall into a rhythm and decide where to prop up my leg so it doesn’t continue to get wet once I slather on the shaving cream, it has changed. my. life.  I now have silky smooth legs every day without a lot of effort.  I don’t have to tell the kids that we can’t go to the pool because Mommy is rocking a Bigfoot look.  I don’t have to wear jeans in 90-degree heat.  I now do that because I want my pants to stick to my sweaty limbs, not because I feel that I must protect the public’s eyes from my Mediterranean turf mat legs.

Why didn’t anyone share this with me before this point?  We’re supposed to be a sisterhood, a sorority of hair removers, but not one woman has ever floated this idea by me.

I know what you’re thinking: why didn’t this naturally occur to me WITHOUT needing it spelled out?  That is an excellent question, and maybe it goes hand in hand with my inability to pass Candy Crush levels.  I’m just not that bright.  Or, as the woman at my grandmother’s nursing home said, “it’s a different kind of smart.”

Anyway, my life is different now.  And blogging changed it.  So thank you.  Thank you wise women of the Internet.

Uh… and what else are y’all doing that I obviously am not?  Give me your best lifehack.

Mine is that I keep cleaning supplies in every room, so I rarely formally clean.  I just walk in a room, use the supplies, and then sit down to do whatever I was entering the room to do.  Hence why cleaning never stresses me out.

There is actually a reason why I asked you yesterday about how late you’d call someone.  A week or so ago, I texted a friend at midnight.  I didn’t expect her to be awake; I just wanted the question to be waiting there on her phone first thing in the morning.  And then, after I hit send, I realized that — and I should preface this with the fact that I am a neophyte with texting.  I didn’t send my first text until this year — I may have just woken her up with a random pinging of her phone at 12 am.

We have a land line, therefore, we turn off our phones before we go to bed.  You can send me emails or text messages all night — I won’t know until I take my phone off airplane mode in the morning.  So I should actually correct that: I put my phone on airplane mode; I don’t actually turn it off.  But it’s off for all intents and purposes.

If it’s an emergency, people can still get a hold of me via my land line.

But I know a lot of people who have cancelled their land line and only use their cell phone.  And in that case, I don’t know if they turn their phone off at night.  If they do, how does someone get through to them in an emergency?  But if they leave their phone on, and I’m sending text messages at midnight, isn’t their phone pinging while they’re trying to sleep?  And in that case, is it rude to send text messages at night?  All this time, I’ve been treating texts like email, but they’re really not like email.  They’re sort of like dialing someone’s phone.

Right?

So… do you have a time you stop texting someone?  And do you turn your cell phone (or put it on airplane mode) at night, or if someone texts you at 2 am, would you hear your phone ding or buzz at 2 am?

And an open apology to anyone I inadvertently pissed off by texting while you were trying to sleep.

My entire life, I have suffered from Too Late To Call anxiety.  There were the people who made my life easy by saying something like, “I go to bed at 8 pm.”  Cool, if I know you go to bed at 8 pm, I don’t call after 8 pm.  Easy to know that 9 pm would be too late to call.

But what about everyone else?

I feel like 11 pm — unless you’ve been told otherwise by the person — is too late to call across the board.  No one appreciates a call at 11 pm.  What about 10 pm?  Most people I know are still awake at 10 pm.  Is it okay to call them then?  I mean, you’re not waking them up, and if they don’t feel like talking, they won’t pick up the phone.  If that’s too late, is 9 pm okay?  9:30?

What is the cut-off time for calling a family member?  A friend?  A complete stranger?  Is it different depending on your relationship with the person?  Or does that not matter: is there a polite cut-off time across the board?  And if there is, what is it?

Moreover, what is too early to call?  My general rule is 8 am for a weekday, 9 or 10 am for a weekend.  I may be playing it too safe, but I get so cranky when someone wakes me up that I never want to be the person who calls and wakes up someone else.

This isn’t usually an issue because who has time to chit chat at 8 am?  But if we’re defining what is too late to call (and I subsequently have another question based on the number we arrive at), we should probably get a working range for too early to call too.

So weekdays AND weekends (unless it’s the same time regardless of the day): what is the acceptable start time for making phone calls and what is the latest time you can call someone and still be polite (the exception being people who have told you not to call after a certain hour)?