Using the phone....

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I have always hated using the phone, with today's technology I have been spoiled with chat programs and texting. I have made a friend recently who does neither. I want to talk to him but I have a very hard time calling someone just to talk.

Even if I find some piddly little reason to start a conversation with them, after a short time I get insecure because I can't tell if I'm boring them or if they are in a hurry to get off the phone. He never texts back because of something wrong with his phone it doesn't show texts, but when I have called him in the past he always answers, or calls me back fairly quickly when a call is missed, and yet...he never calls me.

He is also a co-worker of mine, so I'm not sure if he only politely returns my calls to avoid a bad working situation or he actually wants to be friends.

I genuinely want to build a friendship with this person, but I'm not sure if I should get out of my comfort zone and try calling him or if I should just stop.

Can anyone relate or shed light on this?

I have that problem as well. A very good friend of mine lives about six hundred miles away with his wife and kid. I hate using the telephone, but I try to call him up occasionally to see how they are all doing. Being as it is Christmas, this is the time of the year I'm most likely to call him. For the past few days, I've been thinking of calling him but keep putting it off.

Was it any easier for you to use the phone when you were younger?

Only if it saved me more time and effort than it would take to go see them in person.

We didn't actually get a telephone at home until I was in high school so I really never got used to talking on the telephone as a kid. Prior to that, if we needed to use the telephone, I had to go to my grandparent's house a mile and a half away to use theirs. I really don't even remember calling anyone on the telephone until I was in college.

By the way, when we finally did get a telephone, we kind of overdid it. We had 16 different numbers you could call to get the house. At first we were on a party line with a neighbor who would talk to his girlfriend several hours every night so my father checked into getting a private line. It turned out that it was less expensive to get all four numbers on a party line than one number on a private line so that is what we did.

In addition, the farm is close to the border with Oklahoma and the telephone service comes out of Oklahoma. We had the correct area code for Texas. Our prefix just covered the portion of Texas that was serviced out of that office in Oklahoma.

With the state of the switching equipment at the time, our telephones answered with either the local Oklahoma or Texas area code and either prefix. So four telephone numbers times two area codes time two prefixes equals sixteen unique telephone numbers to call the house.

It wasn't until the 1990s that the telephone company upgraded the switching. Even in the mid 1990s, when you made a long distance call the operator would come on the line and ask for your telephone number so that they could bill it for the telephone call.

Oh my! I grew up with a phone in the house so I have no excuse!

I hate talking on the phone! It always feels like a huge hassle and really awkward. Even when I know it's going to be an automated thing, like calling the pharmacy to get a refill on a prescription, I still put it off for days, or try to get my parents to do it.

I hate talking on the phone! It always feels like a huge hassle and really awkward. Even when I know it's going to be an automated thing, like calling the pharmacy to get a refill on a prescription, I still put it off for days, or try to get my parents to do it.

I have troubgle making phone calls as well. I don't like waiting for the ring to happen. Also I seem to run out of things to say and then not think of anything. I usually give like one word answers.

I hate receiving phone calls. Things have got a little better since the advent of mobile phones because I can at least see who is calling me before I answer, although I still quite often let voicemail get it and ring people back. When I used to work in an office I was lucky enough that my phone would go on ring round if I didn't answer it quickly and I was pretty good at looking busy so someone else would usually pick it up, thus buying me a bit of time to find out who it was and gather my thoughts before dealing with it (I was a hard worker and made up for it in lots of other ways so nobody seemed to mind).

I am a bit better at making phone calls, although I tend only to do so if there is a purpose to them rather than just for a chat. I have a friend who keeps calling me to talk about nothing and I find it quite irritating but keep telling myself that it isn't pointless - the point is he is being social! I am trying to see it from his point of view and be friendly when he calls even though I feel grumpy at being interrupted for no apparent reason.

The lack of phone contact I have with my friends is in no way any reflection of how much I value them or the friendship, at least in my case. Not sure whether it is entirely normal though...