Look, a phone call is an emergency. Someone is in the hospital or you need me over somewhere ASAP, maybe with a weapon.
Otherwise a SMS or email can do it in just fine.
It isn’t even about anxiety (just a bonus) but it’s that everyone sounds like SHIt on a phone speaker. I can’t make out words. Even with HQ headphones on your voice is gonna get rekt by every ambient noise on both our ends.
It’s amazing how bad smartphones are at being telephones. The old black Property of Ma Bell telephones had better sound quality, at least they cradled your ear and captured your voice. As an old fart I can attest to it.
It’s a fundamental limitation of the technology. Anything wireless, when it comes to audio, requires a certain amount of fidelity loss in order maintain real-time transmission without using an astronomical amount of bandwidth. With landline telephones, you have an exclusive, end-to-end physical connection, so you’re free to fully saturate the line with as much information as it can carry. It’s possible to fit multiple analog audio transmissions onto a single copper line, but the signals need a hard frequency cutoff for it to work. This is why long distance and international calls used to sound worse than local ones. In a similar vein, terrestrial radio has to split airspace between multiple stations, which is why it sounds worse than records or reel-to-reel tape, despite each station using a massive amount of bandwidth by modern standards.
Moving into the digital realm, the same principles still apply, but you can push bandwidth requirements way down thanks to the inherent efficiency of digital encoding, plus the magic of digital compression algorithms and error correction. As a result, wireless digital audio transmissions can maintain a much higher level of fidelity than analog ones, compare Bluetooth audio to FM, for example. Quality still needs to be sacrificed somewhere when transmitting wirelessly though, which is why audiophiles bitch about Bluetooth headphones and wireless mics. Even the best digital audio compression can’t compare to a copper cable carrying an unfiltered analog signal.
Digital audio compression is what makes it even remotely possible to have hundreds of real-time audio streams transmitting wirelessly to a cell tower, unfortunately you have to reduce the audio quality down to the absolute limits of usability in order to pull it off. Even if you still have a copper land line, the audio is always going to sound like crap if you talk to someone on a cellphone, it’s just not possible to operate a large cell network with the same level of fidelity.
As a fellow old, can confirm. Old analog landline was actually listenable.
The audio quality is just unbelievably bad. Plus no lip reading to augment things. And if it’s a call center (which feels like 90% of my phone usage because I would never call friends or family by my own choice), good odds they’ll have a thick accent to make things harder.
I’m hearing impaired and I think a lot of my own phone anxiety comes from my hearing. Of course, it’s hard to tell because I don’t have anything to compare it to. But what really stresses me out is the fear of not being able to understand the person on the other end. And it’s not an irrational fear, cause it happens so much! It’s extremely embarrassing having to constantly ask for repetition, having to admit you can’t understand them, or giving a response that makes no sense because I misheard them.
I wish every company would join the 21st century and use email or text. My freaking doctor and dentist have both figured it out, so it’s not a privacy issue stopping Big Chuck’s T-Shirt Emporium from using email.
Yeah I just can’t hear over the phone most of the time. It’s somewhat better on ADHD meds. It’s a lot worse when my allergies are acting up. I find video calls somewhat easier just because I can focus easier if I can read lips and body language.
“It’s just a phone call!” You do not comprehend the mental anguish I experience at the very idea of a phone call, and the utter confusion I feel every day about why it is so god damn terrifying, as I am fully aware that it is, in fact, Just A Phone Call
It’s just so jarring. “Talk to me now!”
and respond coherently and thought out on the fly no mistakes allowed. i delete and rewrite like every text message i wish i could do that in calls
This is going to be the equivalent of a boomer meme soon
I think I have the opposite problem with phones that people on the spectrum have, which is that I get incredibly anxious when I am talking to someone but can’t see their face. Or is that the issue with ASD people too? I know looking people in the eye is often a difficult thing if you are on the spectrum, so I’m wondering if it is still the same.
Even though I’m not good at eye contact or reading facial expressions, it scares the shit out of me if someone’s wearing a full face mask or mascot suit or something where we’re in the same physical space but can’t see their face at all. Over the phone is fine though, so this might just be a weirdly specific phobia.
I don’t know if I’m the best example because I’m kind of an outlier among autistics because I prefer calling over texting for many situations. It’s because 1. I’m almost entirely reliant on tone of voice to read any intent/emotion at all, and 2. sometimes it’s the fastest way to get something over with and not have to stress out over it anymore. Although, I strongly prefer it to be pre scheduled and not a surprise.
I ran into an issue involving just this problem a few years ago. I met someone while I was living abroad. We fell in love but we both had to go back to our respective countries eventually. We tried a long distance relationship for a short whole but agreed it wasn’t going to work out so we just remained good friends and spoke often to each other over video call for a number of years.
When we first met, I found it super easy to talk with her because I was able to read her emotions from her facial expressions. She had a very expressive face which made it easy for me to understand subtext with her compared to other people. When we started talking over video call, I was still able to read her face so the conversation quality didn’t drop any noticeable amount.
About half way into 2020 she moved to another country and wanted to have voice calls as her living conditions changed. Between standard voice quality loss in modern technology, my brains voice audio processing issues (voices in noisy backgrounds are muffled or garbled but I can hear a coin drop in a noisy automated manufacturing plant) and the loss of using video chat felt like
I couldn’t talk or understand her anymore.I was using more mental energy to talk with her.Without video, I could no longer read her face. I could no longer understand her. She did not want to express her feelings verbally to help me understand things which didn’t help. It was a very confusing experience at the time because I didn’t understand what was happening until I was able to piece it together at a later time.
Turns out I hate phone calls because I can’t read a person’s face to help build extra context about what a person is saying. I may not always get context right in face to face conversations but any little bit of information really helps. Facial expressions, body posture, tone and whatever else a person does while talking is all super useful information for me and a phone call strips all of that away.
Eye contact is pretty bad but I’m more self accepting of bad eye contact. The loss of all those visual cues due to a phone call is stressful for me.
I prefer phone calls over face to face because then I don’t have to see you, and at any moment I can make some shit up and end the call.
I surprisingly prefer phone calls, texting makes my way more anxious cause I have time to come up with a reply, versus a more instant replay on the phone
