julieandian.com

I hate the telephone. Not specifically any physical phone, though my cordless phones all seemed to develop terminal battery syndrome within a week of each other, necessitating an implausibly high number of hours spent researching replacements, either to the entire phone setup, or just to the batteries themselves. But I refer to the humble concept of engaging in conversation with another person in a far off place, with no direct visual or chronological involvement.

I have many reasons for this unrestrained animosity. Death comes over the phone. My grandmother, my grandfather. My uncle. My granddad-in-law. My cousin. My other grandmother. Family friends passing away, pets being euthanized. Jobs lost or opportunities missed. Bad news travels fastest over long distance connections. I cringe when I see a message on the answering machine, anticipating the misery that awaits me when I hit the “Play” button. Toss away the mundane, everyday phone conversations, and the number of bad calls in my life greatly outweigh the good ones.

My family isn’t particularly good at phone conversations either. My wife’s family? Unbelievable – they’ll talk literally for hours to each other, get all the news about all the relatives, pass the phone to spouses and children to carry on (presumably once their throats have turned to raspy husks from so much talk). But my mother, father and brother and I aren’t particularly good at it. Conversations between my brother and I start out well, but eventually wind up in discussions of hockey news and our children’s activities. My father usually discusses one of three things: money, computer problems, or my children.

Now, I love my mother. Really I do. But she and I just can NOT carry on a decent phone conversation to save our lives. She brings people and events into discussions like prize fighters bring in jabs and hooks. Unexpected, unexplained and unrelenting. I’ve had my mom go on for twenty minutes about some person I’ve never met and know nothing about, only to have her tell me that they passed away last week. And the knockout punches of shocking news: my father is recovering nicely from his surgery; her MRI went well; the cancer is benign. What? But? How? Sputter. When? Sputter.

This is certainly not to say that I’m blameless. Far from it. On the phone, I have the attention span of a hyperactive 6 year old who’s eaten a dozen doughnuts, a case of PixieStix and has forgotten the Ritalin for the 18th straight day. If I’m sitting, I fidget back and forth until I get up from my seat. If I’m standing, I pace back and forth literally throughout the house, until I sit down and start fidgeting. I look out the window. I watch TV. I surf the Web. Without a visual interaction, I’m not able to pay attention to the person talking to me. I can carry on conversations fairly well in person. I talk to friends, co-workers, even my wife, with little or no problem once the conversation is going (I’m inept with small talk), but I need an audio and a visual component, not just a voice vibrating a speaker that’s near my ear.

Speaking of co-workers, I’ve really started to smash my head against this problem lately at work. I’ve recently been given a new role, where 95% of the people I work with are spread around the world. Silicon Valley, Kansas, Germany, India and China. And all the conversations take place on the telephone.

You can imagine how well I’m doing with that.

Things aren’t as bad if there is a presentation or demonstration taking place while the call is going on. I can match people’s voices and actions and pay attention fairly well if the subject is interesting. But in a call without some visual connection, I’m half a second away from checking scores on ESPN.com.

To help, I’ve resorted to using ‘people puppets’, where I’ve pulled down a few dozen random images from istockphoto.com, and as the conversation goes along, each new speaker gets “attached” to one of these photos. Then as we talk, I can match a face with a name and make it through an entire meeting without buying a half-dozen new DVDs from Amazon by the end.

I do dread the day when I wind up meeting some of these people in person though. The stock photos models may prove to be much more – ahem – photogenic than the real people.