Since I have to give away 99% of my "confidential" information to landleeches to beg for a basement to barely survive in, scammers infest every nook and cranny of the rental market. Ive probably had my info stolen while looking for an apartment 10 times by now. Does anyone do anything about the scammers making fake rental listings? Fuck no! Centralize rental listings in one location? Get fucked!

This of course ignores the GiGa data leaks that happen every 5 days.

Every call I get is a scam call. Every single one.

Till you call I guess. Well guess what, the actual people who want to call me aren't much better then the scammers.

I'm so glad you are living such a good life that you look forward to a phone call. That you are excited to voluntarily interact with another human being. Not everyone has such a privilege.

Phone calls used to be better when they were analog land lines. The fidelity(idk if that's the right word, but go ahead and catch my drift) was amazing.

You could hear every breath, every intonation in voice, every shift in body language. I think our subconscious works on stuff like that a lot more than anyone cares to admit. Every phone conversation you've had in the past 10 years has been digitally compressed.

The headsets themselves were ergonomic. Easy to use, fit the face and head alot better than the phones we use nowadays.

9999 Teams

And if you really don't want me to call you or call you back .... text, email or send me a message that says

CALL ME

That is the single most disgusting uninteresting uninformative and ugliest thing that anyone can text me. You can text me a dick pick, ransom demands, blackmail images, racist crap or gore pictures of something and I wouldn't complain and probably might even respond to you ... but if you just text me 'CALL ME', I'm blocking your number or contact and never answering anything from you again.

I say this as an autist who used to fucking loathe talking on the phone: Its that the phone takes up too much mental energy and time, yet has a time limit on your own responses. Its hellishly stressful when you are socially incompetent, and now a lot of even non-autistic people are becoming socially incompetent.

Now its funny, I hated phone calls back when everyone liked them. Now I'm pretty OK at them because I worked at a call center for a year and now it seems like everyone now hates phone calls. I kinda recognize that the one nice thing about phone calls is there is no "set up your account before ordering your food" type bullshit. There is a consistency to phone calls.

I want shit that leaves a record so when someone pulls a "I didn't say red", I can pull out the text or DM or whatever, and say, "So when you said red here was it that special red that's actually blue?"

For me I hate phone calls because it's someone demanding I drop what I'm doing to address whatever they want. Keep in mind, 99% of phone calls I get are at work form co-workers.

The number of "quick calls" that are actually quick I can count on 1 hand, and still have room for more. I have tasks to accomplish, things to do. And I'm spread so thin between all the things I do, there's a fair chance I'm going to forget something about what you asked/told me. If it's in text form I can review it when I loop back to it. You need me to check/validate/run something, cool. I have record of what, when, and if I completed it. Just because you have a question does not make it an emergency on my part.

As for my home phone, the only folks who ever call me are either telemarketers or scams. If a friend called I'd probably answer (if I have the time). But I think most of my friends are in the same boat, we have so much to do these days (non-recreation) that it's just not easy to find time. A lot of my friends have side-hustles or a second job or are in class (like me) in order to stay competitive. When I was a kid, I remember my parents could unwind at the end of the day, friends would just come over to hang out. It just ain't like that no more.

My biggest reason for not liking calls is that I often very much struggle to actually hear what's being said. I'll take talking in person over a call. Text mediums also have the benefit of being able to be referred back to. Great to double check something, or to cover your ass. I'll take a paper trail any day of the week.

That said though, in my professional life I have encountered a surprisingly huge number of people who just cannot write clearly. It baffles me. Ultimately, to each their own, and I'll try to meet people where they're at. But I much prefer written formats.

Not having to be available at the ready for people is great.

If you arrange for a call, through another asynchronous mechanism, then it's fine. If you cold-call me to ask about the weather (or, more seriously, anything that could have been a text message), I'll leave decapitated horse head in your fridge.

In a world where async communication is effortless, demanding immediate attention is antisocial.

You're saying that you don't care what I'm doing at the moment. You want my full attention immediately. Even leaving a message is more of a time waste than a simple text message

1. don't call unless it's urgent
2. if you're calling me it's not urgent

This doesn't apply to landlines, ofc

Two words for me. Read. Receipts. I have found that someone will inevitably text me and say, "why didn't you respond?" Fucker. You texted me. Want me to actually engage with you? Call me. Otherwise you're now at my mercy.

I prefer calling because it's easy to silence and just let it go to VM if I am busy. Call back immediately and that's usually a sign of being needed.