Emails: permanent written record I can refer to later
Can reply in my own time
Low labour
Low resource use
Phone call: Times/dates mentioned will be forgotten often
Active demand of time
I don’t pick up because that phone number looks weird but also my phone’s vibrate function is weak
High labour
High data cost per information
My shrink’s office seems to want to keep billing information and past/present appointments secret. (This also seems to be worse in local industry, everything has to be a meeting instead of a two line email)
My unironic answer is that like, idk, 50? 70? percent of Americans are only semi-literate and cannot write coherent text and struggle to read it.
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How many dyslexic people in the US would ever even get diagnosed? That would require a semblance of healthcare right?
Something like 50% of US adults cannot read at a 6th grade level.
I opt for phone calls because I am easily cowed by bureaucratic language and page structure, and I can’t ask a page of text questions
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If I was getting those sorts of emails from regular trusted clients, I’d ask them to stop sending those. I’m not cold calling (though I regularly get cold called as a random person)
What makes you think businesses only get emails from regular trusted clients? Their inbox is as jammed with bullshit as anyone’s
Like, I get that’s a part of business, but surely there’s another part of the business that could have a restricted email address and you’re not having to sort between new email addresses and trusted ones.
Like, at my job I’m not in charge of getting new clients, but I still have to set up meetings and clients very trad like for very minor details that could just be a pair of one line emails. The only spam we get is advertising for products we already use (autodesk stuff mostly), we’re not really getting confused between those and one of our clients asking for drawings.
And I’m an established client of my psychiatrist, why do they preference calling out to me? Especially when I never pick up and repeatedly ask them to email me.
Etc
I just feel like it’s pointless cultural preponderance a lot of the time.
it varies from place to place… in my last job it was hopeless trying to keep up with the never ending flood of bullshit emails so i didn’t even try
in my current job i can keep my inbox completely clean at all times
Reasons they might prefer phone calls over emails:
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Email is a written record you have and can potentially use against them. They can tape phone calls but they know you’re unlikely to tape them.
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It is easier to upsell something in a phone call than in an email.
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If there are more emails than there’s time to answer, they get a backlog. If there are more phone calls than there is time to answer you get a backlog or give up altogether.
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It is easier to push a customer towards the resolution they want in a phone call than in an email.
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I prefer to email, almost exclusively. It’s so convenient and unobtrusive, and leads to more thoughtful conversation, but no one wants to check their email anymore because it reminds them of work.
Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You? is partially an epistolary novel in the form of long emails and that gave me some hope that there are perhaps some other emailists still out there.
I have been nudged on the issue. You’d use text/phone as a walkie talkie and be responsible for emails the same way you might look at a pile of mail when convenient. That sounds cozy
I feel like a text is like a short email, or email is like a long text. But it feels like a more professional/legal thing compared to in person chats/chatroom/messenger.
well, if you commit to something in writing you can actually be held to it, unlike calls
And it’s cheap/universal if you already have employees standing around (or more likely, actually working and just expected to multitask manning the phones). Plus its harder to automate and spam phone calls than emails. Plus for a long time a lot of people in the types of jobs tasked with answering phones for small businesses or locations of large ones, have been functionally tech-illiterate if not actually illiterate. You’d be surprised how many people over 50 never learned to computer (not like poorly, but almost completely unable)
Your shrink is probably worried about HIPAA compliance if in the US
Americans are wild about HIPAA when there’s such limited enforcement
(Most of the ones since 2019 are penalties for companies refusing to provide medical information to patients)
yeah. I mean good that medical providers take it seriously, but the solution in any sane world would not be to forgo digital transfer of information entirely
Australia, but maybe. They send emails if I ask, but their preference is for a secretary to call about my upcoming appointment
in short everything will marginally dehumanize and extract value until the working class cannot reproduce itself and the world dies
Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets, within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women, children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster, glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane.
—Carlo Cafiero, Summary of Marx’s Capital (1879)
What weirds me out is when customers prefer phone calls to emails. They want your assurance that an issue is being handled, they ask you to insist that you’ll remember to call them back, and like, my note system is just scrawlings in Windows Notepad. If its in email, my boss sees it and I have a ledgerof undone tasks with timestamps. Asking me to manually do it all on the phone is begging me to lose it, or if I hate to, to intentionally fail to do it. That’s much harder to do in email
“wow thanks for calling great stuff really listening intently, could you put all that in an email? That’d be great”
Maybe it’s some personal preference if it’s not too large of an organization? Some people have different communication styles.
Sometimes it’s quicker to verbally transmit a lot of information that isn’t worth memorializing in the kind of detail or with enough context for it to make sense.
Some places it’s a cultural practice around not documenting things so that it’s less traceable later.
back/forth exchanges are much faster on a phone call than email, turn around time is in seconds.
I agree.
With small businesses, no one wants to hire someone to stand around checking the computer. Plus most people are terrible at writing emails.
My number one use of chatGPT is corpo-ing up my emails >.>
phone or work phone that gives email notifications? i feel like that’d be a lot more convenient seeing they could wait 5 minutes vs having to immediately drop whatever they’re doing for a call
Old people
Emails are so much more annoying to troubleshoot whenever I get a client sending us an email saying “X and Y is BROKEN”. It’s equally annoying on a phone call - but at least then I have them physically by the ear and can hear the lie in their voice when I go “and have you tried a different browser?”
Of course, because I don’t really mind phone calls - they have become my responsibility so I am fully 100% with you that we need to switch fully to email.
I don’t think we need to switch fully to email, I just think phone is unnecessarily preferenced. :/
I think you may be underestimating the labor required to respond to emails on the part of the business, depending on the task and what information is typically needed. I understand wanting a written record of things, but I get a lot of client emails that turn into ridiculous chains because people can’t follow directions or things are harder to explain in text or a document is missing and it takes another 3 days for them to reply, etc, etc.
I’ve had people schedule meetings with me and those meetings come before I’ve ever even had a chance to see their email because of the volume we get. Then we resolve whatever it is in 5 minutes and don’t have to worry about it anymore. I’ve also had people email me a laundry list of very complex questions that will take much more time to explain in writing and will definitely not be done promptly because I have 5 minutes between other meetings to write out a response to 1 out of 10 questions and it takes me that long to even parse all of what it is they are asking.
There’s definitely situations wheres meetings should have been emails, but at least in my position, there’s equally as many things that should have been a phone call or Zoom meeting or something instead.
EDIT: Ideally, email is for less complex questions or things that can wait a significant length of time (like 1 - 2 weeks in my position), where meetings/phone calls are for more urgent or complex situations. But this definitely isn’t the reality.
I feel like meetings are preferenced way too highly in my workplace. If it will involve a back and forth, meetings are actually faster, but asking “what is the valve on line 3s code?” Does not require a phone call or a scheduled meeting or phone call, and I can busy myself with other things while I wait for the info.
