How To Make Friends on the Telephone

Dan writes "What a wonderful find--it seems since the internet, we've forgotten the correct way to communicate with people. So here is a book to teach us the proper etiquette, as well as how to handle complex modern communications devices."

as i learned last night in a dance club...

[phaetonic]

talking over the phone, via e-mail is not as clear cut as body language

complex modern communications devices

[Dreadlord]

as well as how to handle complex modern communications devices

Dude, this is /. , if people here don't already know how to handle these things, who knows?

Ok, thats great

[random_culchie]

Looks like we will have to phone the webmaster and tell him he will soon been /.ed. Whats the proper way to do that?

Re:Ok, thats great

[arieswind]

who knows, the page with that info is /.ed atm

Gr8

[Anonymous Coward]

do u no if u can d/l it?

Re:complex modern communications devices

[Dreadlord]

And you must have blown a funny fuse or something.

Telephone?

[sirGullible]

What's a "telephone"? Is it like VoIP

The hardest thing...

[Bishop, Martin]

The hardest thing about a phone conversation is trying to figure out how to pronounce "pwn3d!"

Re:Ok, thats great

[cgenman]

Recently a friend of ours was trying to get a ride to a party, but didn't start trying to contact us until after she was in our area. She called a few times until her cell battery died. She borrowed someone's computer at a cafe to e-mail us. She IM'ed us. She called from a payphone. She got frantic.

She did everything but come up and ring our doorbell. Which would have worked: we were at home.

Sometimes technology can cause people to forget the obvious ways of doing things.

What?

[The Meshback]

So you're telling me I shouldn't answer the phone by saying:

WTF do you want?

These are trying times

[annielaurie]

I'm using the phone more, not less. For example:

1) Hey, I'm about to e-mail you three .JPG images and a Word Document. They're not pr0n, they're not viruses, and they're not malware from some cretin in China who wants to turn you into a zombie.

2) Hi there. I need to fax you the final proposal. I'm not trying to get you to re-finance your mortgage.

3) Did you, by chance, e-mail me three .JPG images and a Word document? I want to make sure they're not pr0n, viruses, or malware from some cretin in China who wants to turn me into a zombie.

See? The telephone isn't obsolete at all.

Re:Phone skills are definitely declining...

[vxvxvxvx]

You dial the number, with all info in hand.

*ring*
*ring*
*ring*

[them] Hello?
[you] Hi, I'm having some problems with my cable modem connection. My name is Papa Smurf, account number 1234567, and the mac address on my NIC is 00:00:00:00:00:00.
[them] Uh, what? This is Joanne's Haircare?

With or without a modem?

[Eberlin]

I've always replied to anyone who wanted to communicate over the telephone that I'm lost without a modem hooked up to the phone line. "You mean that's not just for hooking up a modem to?"

In a related story, I forget what the program was -- something that you can pop AT commands to directly...but a long time ago, my sister refused to relinquish the line so I did ATA while she was on. Kept the beeeeeeeeep on long enough for her to hang up. And thus began the great phone wars.

As far as real phone manners go, there should be a true syn-ack handshake for it. syn-> phone rings. "Hello, my name is..." terminating with the fin "um...I'm sorry, so in so does not live here anymore" [No Carrier]

Anyone that doesn't follow the protocol shouldn't be allowed to communicate. :)

Re:Communication communication everywhere...

[Anonymous Coward]

All these methods of communication only help you make new friends when the new friends wouldn't or couldn't make an effort to communicate in person. That sounds bad, but consider the case of stalking girls-normally they're afraid of creepy guys they don't know, and for good reason. If you stalk them online and get their IM names, you can get to know them in a non-threatening way, so they have their guard down when you meet them in person and kidnap them to add to your dungeon. That sure has improved my social life!

Re:The only thing you need to know about telephone

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

When you are at work, in your office or cubicle or whatever, and the telephone rings, and you answer it...under NO circumstances is it appropriate for the first word out of your mouth to be "Hello?"

No? How about just plain "WHAT!" or "FUCK YOU" and a nice healthy SLAM! Or "DUDE! I'm, like, in the MIDDLE of some serious SHIT. Call back." But not "Hello"? How about "Hi, how are you, I have gas"? I mean, a suggestion as to why "hello" is so bad, or some alternatives might be nice.

Seriously, "Hello" followed by perhaps your name or department is JUST FINE.

Using a telephone is like ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... smoking.

You see it in '40/'50 movies a lot, but that doesn't mean it's in vogue today.

Seinfeld obligatory quote!

[Man in Spandex]

hmm friends? telephone? How can I give a HIGH-FIVE thru the telephone?!!

Puddy: High-Five!

Re:The only thing you need to know about telephone

[Sexy Bern]

I worked in Germany for a while. I wasn't told that the convention there is to answer the phone and merely state your surname.

First day, didn't know everybody's name. Phone rings, German geezer answers the phone and simply says "tits"!!

Different phone rings, another geezer answers, says what sounded "fuck"!

Me starts to think this is the Stuttgart office of the Tourette's society. Later learn that their names were "Titze" and "Foerch".

Oh, how we laughed.

Ha ha.

Re:as i learned last night in a dance club...

[armando_wall]

talking over the phone, via e-mail is not as clear cut as body language.

I think that I can express myself better over the phone, thank you. Going to a club and using my body language while dancing could send the message "Hey, ladies, our children could be beaten up everyday at school!".

For the next time

[TubeSteak]

next time they call to sell you something, tell them you're out of town and won't be back till next week. See what they do with that.

telemarketers

[M. Baranczak]

A better approach is to let them go through their whole pitch, then say something like: "Hold on, let me get my credit card." Then put them on hold, and ignore them. If they think they've made a sale, they WILL NOT hang up, and will stay on the line for as long as it takes (a friend of mine claims he once strung one of them along for five hours.) And while they're waiting for you, they won't be able to harass other people. Of course, you have to be willing to give up a phone line for the duration of your little game.

Re:as i learned last night in a dance club...

[Dinosaur Neil]

My body language seems to translate as, "Do as I say and no one gets hurt..."

Re:as i learned last night in a dance club...

[superpulpsicle]

LOL H0ti3. U know I am so l33t3. L3t g0 s0m3wh3r3 kewl aight. Nod 8p

How can I possibly say that over the phone and not sound like a retard?

Telephone???

[concatenation]

What next, "Sexy swirls: an introduction to smoke signals"?

Re:Communication communication everywhere...

[billimad]

I was introverted *before* I ever touched a computer

welcome home buddy!!!

Make friends on the Telephone?

[ScrewMaster]

Sounds like a better title for this book would be "Social Engineering for Dummies."

Cringe making TV advert

[BillGodfrey]

"If you're sat around at home, make new friends on the telephone. 0898 ... ..."

The headline eerily reminded me of that one.

Re:The only thing you need to know about telephone

[balloonhead]

I always say that first. Closely followed by other stuff, like my name or where I'm answering from (in a hospital, usually something like "hello, Ward 103, can I help you?" or some such thing.

I never tell them who I am at work though. No-one would ever ask for me by name so it avoids them taking the opportunity to quiz me on the health of their relative and instead I can just pass the call on to someone else.

I have also mastered complete ignorance of the noise of the phone, so I can usually out-wait anyone within hearing distance so they answer it first.

Re:My thoughts

[BrianB]

Also, what's with people making phone calls from the public toilet? When I was at WWDC this year, I saw tons of people doing this, usually they were european. (No pun intended, but it's tempting.) Is this a cultural thing that I as an american don't understand? Seems to me the sound of background flushing would be a bit off-putting to a co-worker or potential customer.

Shortly after we got wifi at my company, someone I know was in a bathroom, and there's a guy in the stall talking on the phone. The guy says "Let me send you that file...", there's the sound of typing and he says "there you should have it".

The guy was actually connected to the network with his laptop from the bathroom!

A more recent technology etiquette book

[jesser]

Can I Fax a Thank-You Note? (1998) [amazon.com] covers phones, cell phones, beepers, fax machines, e-mail, IRC, and usenet. It is both funny and full of useful advice.

Excerpt:

Everyone deserves a greeting

Have you noticed how impolite people are on the phone? You sweetly answer your phone: "Hello?" You're greeted with "Yeah. Let me talk to Billy," or "Uh, I was callin' about the tickets," or "Is Sherry there?"

The person answering your phone call at the very least deserves a hello. If you are acquainted with the person answering the phone -- even if you just know his name or have only spoken with him on the phone -- you should try to greet him with a sentence. This is equally important in social and business situations. Say you're calling your friend Liz and her husband, George, answers the phone. Depending on how close you are with George, you may say, "Hi, George, it's (your name). How are you?" or something like that. It is rude simply to say, "Hi George, it's (your name), can I speak to Liz?" George desrves a polite social interchange.

Another excerpt:

No one

ever wants to hear your beeper. Beeping mode should not exist. In fact, the only reason it does exist is so that we don't have to call them vibrators.

Re:Phone skills are definitely declining...

[Lord_Dweomer]

"I've noticed that many human operators don't seem to know how to answer with a warm greeting, ask for information, put people on hold correctly, or bridge a call to the right person."

Perhaps they have different phone customs in India?

Ford Motor Co.

[metalligoth]

In the Detroit area, one of the suburban area codes (248-xxx-xxxx) is 248.

At Ford headquarters, one of the local city exchanges is 248. (xxx-248-xxxx).

Whenever anyone from downtown Detroit tries to call someone from the suburbs with a 248 area code, and doesn't dial a "1" to indicate a long distance call, they get some unhappy engineer at Ford.

It usually goes something like this:

*ring* Ford employee notices local number on Caller ID they don't recognize...

"Ford Motor Co. this is xxxx"

*In very strong urban accent* "Is Tiniqua there?"

"Excuse me? This is For-"

"If you don't put Tiniqua on the phone, some shit is goin' down. Who the f*** are you, cracka?"

"This isn't who you tried to dial. This is For-"

"WHAT? You sayin' I stu-pid too? I can't dial no phone? I don't think so. That's it! I'm comin' down there to find out where tha hell she is!"

*click* *sigh*

*true story*

Re:How long can I hold up...

[kjd]

My own TiBook on cable. Be gentle.

I'll be sure to load the page as delicately and slowly as possible.

Re:Ok, thats great

[geeber]

I'm up for shooting kids wanting to sell me candy bars in the head for knocking on my door.

Curious. I've never had anybody try to sell me a candy bar in the head before. And do they put the candy bar in the head as a result of knocking on the door? Or is the desire to sell caused by the knocking, and then the candy bar is added to the head after the fact?

Quite an existential dilemma you have there. No wonder you just want to shoot the damn kids and be done with it.

Over 7 years ago...

[Andy_R]

assuming there is a 7 year statute of limitations... I had in my office a mysterious phone socket, which didn't seem to generate a telelphone bill. This was long before caller id, so I had no way of finding out the number, so I used that one for outgoing calls and my own for incoming.

A side effect of this is that every incoming call on the mystery line was a wrong number. Following my high standards of telephone etiquette, I started off politely greeting callers with "Hello, this is the wrong number.", which (despite being factual, formal, polite and clear english) seemed to baffle the vast majority of callers.

Responses varied from polite confusion, through stubborn insistence that I must either BE the person the other party wanted to speak to or at least able but unwilling to put me though to them, all the way to someone who called 10 times in as many minutes asking for "Dave", getting more annoyed each time. On the 10th call I said "OK, you win this is Dave, what do you want?", at which point he hung up on me.

After a while I got bored with politeness and switched to making prank answers (like prank calls, but the other way round), the objective of which was to keep a straight face while cracking everyone else in the office up. The most successful of these was 'dial-a-duck', the premium rate porn service for duck fetishists, which involved answering the phone with "Hi, welcome to Dial-a-Duck", and then carring on the resulting conversation using only the word "quack", in as seductive a manner as possible.

Re:as i learned last night in a dance club...

[Moonelf]

You are posting on Slashdot and expecting us to believe you went to a dance club?

Re:Over 7 years ago...

[Otto]

I had in my office a mysterious phone socket, which didn't seem to generate a telelphone bill. This was long before caller id, so I had no way of finding out the number, so I used that one for outgoing calls and my own for incoming.

A side effect of this is that every incoming call on the mystery line was a wrong number.

I had a similar situation in my fraternity in college... We had a payphone that had no ringer or coin slot.. it would only take credit card calls. I found the number to it by dialing the local ANI code (how I figured that out is a whole other story), but I also worked out where the wire went and connected up the light in the "booth" to the line such that it would blink when someone called it. The main reason for doing this was so that we could get calls on that line. Easy hack. I didn't want to put in a ringer because the phone guy would get ticked at us about it, but he never noticed the blinking light. :)

In any case, I found out that we got a lot of wrong numbers on that line because somebody else knew the number as one that was "never answered" and gave it away to people all the time, appearantly. There was some girl that was appearantly using it to give to guys in bars and clubs and such. You invent your own way to mess with these guys heads, we probably used them all for that one. :D

In another case, after we rewired the building to have individual lines to the rooms, I was living in another building that had an interesting property on its phone number.. The number for the courthouse was something like 341-2345, which the number to our line was 364-1234, and both "341" and "364" were normal prefixes for that area. Meaning that if you dialed the number without thinking too much, you could dial the wrong prefix, but continue the number and get us instead.. Like if you dialed 364-12345. The upshot is that we got a lot of wrong numbers for people wanting to know how much the fine for their speeding tickets was. I mean a *lot* of wrong numbers, like at least 3 or 4 a week. Eventually, me and the other people in that building started giving out amounts of the fines and addresses to send the tickets to. Just random ones at first, then we'd tell them addresses of our friends, or the post office, or various buildings on the campus. Lots of fun. Gave the people grief about speeding and such.. Tell them that there was no fine, they'd have to go to jail for a weekend, just crazy stuff we thought up. It was all probably illegal though, as we were impersonating police officers. ;)

Re:how about "FUCK OFF"

[cpghost]

What's your username again?

*mumble*

>clickety click...< Now you have plenty of free disk space.

Re:Ok, thats great

[Insightfill]

Recently had a coworker who told me about his experience in a parking lot.

Seems a young woman was standing outstide her car and the remote on the keyfob (to unlock the doors) had run down its batteries. She just kept pushing the button, getting more and more frantic that she was locked out of the car. She considered even going to one of the stores at the lot and buying a battery, but didn't know what kind or how to do it.

So my friend walks up, asks for her car keys, and sticks the key in the car door lock and turns the key.

He said her expression was priceless.