Some people are afraid of heights. Others are afraid of spiders.
I am afraid of talking on the phone.
I am awful at it. Either I lose my train of thought and stutter, or I panic and start talking too fast and don’t make any sense.
Just the anticipation of having to deal with phone calls that I am loathe to deal with makes me sick with anxiety. Sometimes, it even drives me to the verge of tears. I have tried every trick there is to get over it, and nothing has worked.
And then, I sound like a crazy person, because it’s a phone call, grow up, get over it.
I don’t think I’ve always hated the phone. When I was twelve, I was content to spend hours on the phone with N.A; we had mutual crushes on each other, and I cannot tell you what we talked about for all those hours, but I know I thought it was important enough to campaign for my own phone line. My parents said I could, if I brought up my grades in Spanish and Math. Therein lay the dilemma – I couldn’t get my own line and spend unlimited time on the phone until I brought my grades up, but I certainly was in no place to bring my grades up when there was a boy who wanted to talk to me on the phone.
Luckily, he lost interest in me, I got straight As the first marking period of 8th grade, and I got my phone line.
Since then, the phone has been a primary form of communication (in high school, before AIM was the standard, and WAY before texting), a form of connection, (in college, to my friends who were far away) and a form of torture (carrying my cell phone around, willing it to ring when I was hoping that HWSNBN would call me.) But in college, other forms of communication became more important. AIM meant I could talk to several different people at once. Email was more convenient than picking up the phone. Making and recieving phone calls just fell out of practice.
It wasn’t until after college that phones started to make me nervous. I was temping at a company that to this day, I have no idea what they did. My job was simple: answer the phone, direct the calls. That’s it. Sometimes they let me put labels on files, but as a temp, I wasn’t allowed to do anything real.
Anyway, for whatever reason some of the people at this company (engineers? technicians?) were often recieving Important Phone Calls, and the person on the line would request that I page them. I’ve always hated the sound of my own voice, and having to do this several times a day was cringeworthy. Then there was the time — it was my first day actually – when I mistakenly dialed the number for the head of the company just because the delivery guy had his number on the receipt. Luckily, his assistant picked it up and explained what was what. In my own defense, I was only 21, barely out of college and naive to the fact that if someone’s extention is 01, then they are probably pretty important.
In search of health insurance, I did manage to land a full time job. Actually, they didn’t hire me at first. They hired Charice. But poor, unknowing Charice got promoted after two weeks there. As she said once “I sold out. Rachel got hired.” I was still a receptionist, except now I was a receiptionist with health insurance. It wasn’t too bad. Mostly, I just directed people to customer service.
Then I got promoted. It was awesome! It was to a job I actually wanted to do! It was more money! And I wouldn’t be tied to a desk, which to me, was at least 50% of the appeal.
The Friday before I was supposed to start my new position, my supervisor’s boss, without even bothering to pull me aside, told me “oh by the way, we don’t have the money to pay you. So we can’t promote you to that position.”
I was crushed. While it was probably a good thing (it motivated me even more to finish my grad school applications) I felt totally stuck as a receptionist.
By then head of my department liked me. He knew I was smart and felt bad about the whole promotion debacle. He started giving me projects. At first, I was happy at the chance to prove myself and I accepted the admin role in spite of the fact that the new title didn’t come with a bigger paycheck. And the fact that my extension was still 0, I was still tied to a desk, and there were beginning to be mumblings about my phone mannerisms.
It was May, because it was right before my birthday when the suggestion box had a note in it, for probably the first time in its existence. “The receptionist” (it read. not even my name. Just “the receptionist”) is a black hole of despair. would it kill her to fake some charisma ” While this incident is retrosepctively hilarious, I got written up and went on a quest to find out just who the hell cared whether or not I smiled. (the answer: 40 something washed up wannabee opera singer. I got him back though.)
It only got worse from there. Two years later, at the Job-That-Wasn’t, I had to make a lot of phone calls, to people who I could barely understand on the phone, on topics where I had no idea what I was talking about. Additionally, there were times when I was supposed to “pressure” people into getting things done. Mind you, Job That Wasn’t was a tiny company and I was on the phone with Big Important Company that could have cared less about my request, but that did not mean anynoe in my department understood any better why the request was going to take the standard 24 hours.
The last guy I dated refused to call to make plans, instead preferring a barrage of back and forth text messages. That was a little extreme, even for me. But that also didn’t mean my heart didn’t pound wildly whenever I decided to grow a spine, call him, and call him out for being kind of a jerk. (I have regretted most of these phone calls. Don’t keep the phone numbers of people you used to date in your cell phone)
Really, the phone has never done me any good these past few years. All it has done is given me the means to call boys that I shouldn’t call, given me a cell phone that I feel lost when I don’t have, and given various Powers That Be a means to torture me.
When you think about it, texting is kind of like a more advanced form of telegraphing. So clealy Thomas Edison had it right and Alexander Graham Bell ruined everything.
