The Damned Phone

I think it is because of the bizarre way I look at the world: I find the telephone among the worst of evils of the modern world when I must use it for voice communications, and among the most important, vital, and utterly beautiful creations (which, I am convinced, will be the tool that will finally give us universal literacy, suffrage, and even intellectual freedom) when I connect it to my computer.

There are exactly two people I am comfortable talking to by phone. My friend Diogenes, and a woman I have known my entire adult life in Florida whom I will pseudonym Sophia (wisdom).

Diogenes and I have a mutual agreement about language: Say it, mean it, explain it clearly or shut the fuck up. Neither of us is likely to misunderstand the other, we both speak in a very similar manner. He is a bit younger than I, and I was (I think) instrumental in teaching him the finer points of savage intellectual debate. The chances of us hurting one another's tender feelings on the phone is zero, mostly because emotional misunderstandings simply cannot occur when you have spent years arguing in the same style. (as an aside, one of my proudest moments was when he smoked me in an argument so completely that I was forced to admit that I was arguing based on an egotistical desire not to be wrong rather than an intellectual desire to be right. It was at that moment that I first realized the real value of losing an argument: Once you lose, and accept the correctness of the opponent's position, you are NO LONGER WRONG, and if there is one thing worse than being wrong, it is STAYING that way. Yes, Diogenes, photons are massless particles)

Sophia I have known nearly forever, and she is a bit older than I, and was instrumental in forming the way I communicate, much in the same way I was to Diogenes. In other words, all the miscommunications that are going to happen have already happened, we both realize the limitations of language, and we simply talk.

Everybody else (and I mean EVERYBODY else, my wife of 20 years included) causes me varying amounts of extreme discomfort to communicate with on the phone.

Serious discomfort. Sweating, trembling limbs, stammering, mental distraction and occasional terror. Phobia stuff, irrational reactions to normal events.

I feel like I am speaking to dead people. I feel like I have absolutely no grasp of the emotional content of any conversation, because I can't SEE it. Offense, confusion, misunderstanding, aggressiveness, anger, happiness, sudden understanding, distraction, even a need to cut the conversation short to go to the bathroom is all stuff I SEE on peoples faces and read from their body language, and I am really good at it. But NONE of that input is available on the phone, and I hate it. Talking to corpses that don't know they are dead.

So, to everybody out there I simply won't talk to on the phone for longer than about 30 seconds, you now know why. To those who are offended by that, I do apologize. This means YOU, wife of Diogenes, for whom, (because of the risk of offending) I will not choose a pseudonym.

With he two exceptions above, I worry about offending nearly everybody. Now, most people, even tho I worry about offending them, I simply don't care. The worry is ethereal and abstract. But for others, those people who have a VERY high emotional content in their conversation, the risk of offense is so great that the normal phone-terror turns to ... well.... outright fear. It amounts to this: the easier you are to offend in person, the harder a time I will have talking to you on the phone.

One (yet another) of the pieces of my personality that are whimpy beyond imagining. It's okay, I make up for it in other ways.