Missed Call

What an awesome weekend! My sister Prinna performed on Saturday night in front of 1,000+ people at a show called The Moth. She stood alone on a stage for 15 minutes and just told one of the most moving and emotional stories ever. The audience was captivated. Those who weren't holding their breaths were sniffling and wiping away tears. It was amazing. She was definitely a showstopper.

I planned to come home and call Geo to tell him all about it, but instead I texted him. "Hey, you still up?" A few minutes later he responded, "Kind of. Already was sleeping though." And instead of ringing him up to run through the fabulous night, I wrote back, "Okay, wanna talk tomorrow?" And he's all "Yup."

Quite frankly, I was relieved. I was exhausted and had already been texting him all night about the show, so there was not a load more to say. Plus, I was about 10 seconds away from drooling on my pillow and snoring (#sohot) and I hate talking on the phone when I'm tired. In fact, I just am not a fan of phone calls to begin with.

Yes. I'm in a long-distance relationship and I am the worst phone-call talker ever. I get distracted, bored, tired, or confused when I can't see the other person's reactions. Most of my conversations with Geo consist of me stressing about wedding stuff and him reliving some awesome thing in Halo or something. After about 5 minutes we are both markedly checked out of the conversation. Ugh, phone calls are so HARD!

I was talking about this with some friends tonight and we said "Ugh, remember when were we teenagers and we'd sit on the phone for HOURS talking to people we had spent all day with!? What in God's name did we talk about?!" Back then, I could talk for 2 hours about what so-and-so wore and now I can barely make it through a 15-minute conversation with the man I'm going to marry who lives in Alabama about travel plans for holidays or what the groomsmen should wear at the wedding.

I also hate companies who force me to call them. No online appointment page or email address? I will not be visiting your salon/restaurant. I also don't have email contact information for my onsite property manager or the church for our wedding. No, instead I have to CALL them up, talk to a live person, and I can't go back and erase any poorly-executed jokes. There are also people who take forever to form an actual thought, and I would much rather wait 20 minutes to get a clearly-worded email than spend 5 minutes trying to figure out what a person is trying to say. Plus, there is no documentation from a phone call. With an email, the time or date or whatever is right there in black and white. Rely on my memory or crappy notes for that kind of information? BAD IDEA.

As a point of reference, I will tell you that my phone plan gives me 450 minutes of anytime minutes every month, and rolls over any minutes I don't use in a month. I've banked like 1,574,900 minutes. My last phone bill claims I made it through the month with using 102 minutes.

I don't know when I started hating talking on the phone, but it happened. If a phone call is going to last longer than 5 minutes, I just put it off. Sadly, I've lost touch with a lot of friends because I've procrastinated The Phone Call. Then it just gets longer and longer and I know that there will be MORE to catch up and the vicious cycle continues.

This is not to say I don't appreciate phone calls. Often and under the right circumstances, a phone call is important, funny and more convenient. We just need to teach everyone in the world which information would be better communicated through email/text and which info needs to shared by phone. What do you think, should we start a phone tree or just send out a mass text?