When You Need to Reach Out and Touch Someone

Rather than type a text, send an email, or post a Facebook message, I picked up the telephone when I needed to contact some of my students this week about a new class that I was teaching. My goal was to reach as many continuing students as I could as quickly as I could so they had first choice of available seats. Telephone? you might ask thinking of all the other options I could have used. Sure, you remember that clunky, dusty thing that sits behind the computer monitor acting as a paperweight for the 2010 staff directory and last winter's pepperoni pizza coupons. The telephone.

I'll admit a land-line is probably not the first choice of the techno-savvy who have Schwarzenegger-sized thumbs from constant, frenetic texting, but I still find it an effective tool to make contact with students -- even my 20-somethings. I did not consider this choice unusual or dated until I read a Wall Street Journal article by Anita Hofschneider a few days later titled, "That Thing With the Buttons and Receiver? Pick It Up" (Wednesday, Aug. 28, D1). Hofschneider quotes young entrepreneurs who roll their eyes at the phone as an old-fashioned nuisance, "burdensome" one said, and another complained that phone interruptions "hinder creativity and delay projects."

Some of these enlightened ban the phone from their office space. I suppose a non-phone environment makes sense in a sleep lab, a yoga center, or religious retreat house -- or if you were very, very annoyed during political campaign season -- but removing it entirely seems as productive as taking away the letter "R" from the keyboard. The _esult is _eadable but ve_y dist_acting. And, after reading the WSJ article, I wondered if the quoted anti-phone people were also as annoyed by the ping of instant messaging or the lure of the latest Tweet by a 15-minute-of-fame celebrity. Perhaps anti-phone sentiment is just revenge for this summer's sold-out rock concert tours by septuagenarians.

As a w_ite_, sorry, I meant "writer," I understand the power of the printed word through texts, emails and social media, but I don't think the human voice should be a casual second or third-hand communication choice.  Relationships in sales, in business, and in education are built through voice and gestures, interpersonal human contact, not emoticons. The sound of the human voice communicates nuances and meaning that goes much deeper than the flat, convoluted prose of written language, especially the pseudo-proper business grammar in most offices. The draw of human contact is why, for example, students prefer face-to-face classrooms as opposed to online or video courses, especially when they struggle with a topic. Working beside a real person, not a white screen with words, makes all the difference.

I agree with the sales manager interviewed in the article who said in professions "where personal rapport matters ... email (exclusivity) won't cut it." Having done a little sales work myself, I appreciate the effectiveness and place of the phone in the business world, and I do feel for the office manager at the end of the WSJ article who had to teach a new employee "what a dial tone was and explain that desktop phones don't require you to press 'Send'." I wonder what that new employee's thumbs looked like?