Texts vs. Emails vs. Phone Calls

[Mountaineer]

I finally broke down and bought a cell phone and activated it, slightly over two years ago - June 2018. I'd bought cell phones prior but never activated them. Only used them as portable internet devices.

This is a Moto G6 (Motorola) $200 that was one of the phone that would would work with Google FI. In rural area where I am cell phone coverage can be spotty so I wanted something that could make phone calls over WiFi. Good decision on my part.

But I continued to use this phone as strictly a portable internet device. I don't think I used it to make my first phone call until 1 1/2 years later, this past January.

Tonight I needed to receive a text so I pulled out the manual to see what app does that. Activated it.

Decided to try it out by sending a text to a coworker who oftentimes never sees my emails in a timely manner and is always telling me to send her a text if it is important.

Here is my text (first ever on this phone) to her:

"....you are always telling me to text you. Have owned this phone for over two years and this is my first text ever on it. Extremely painful to type using only one finger with one half the time the wrong letter appearing. Are you receiving this? This may be both the start and finish of my texting career!

"Email reigns!

"This even way worse than I always dreaded it would be. This is PURE torture! Signing off for maybe forever!"


I wanted to add one more text to say: "In the time it took me to type all the above via text I could have typed in an email the entire War and Peace book!"

What a horrendous experience!

Vinny

Try dictating your text. Much easier if more than a couple of words to send. My iPhone enables dictation, not sure about other phone operating systems.

[vnatale]

I finally broke down and bought a cell phone and activated it, slightly over two years ago - June 2018. I'd bought cell phones prior but never activated them. Only used them as portable internet devices.

This is a Moto G6 (Motorola) $200 that was one of the phone that would would work with Google FI. In rural area where I am cell phone coverage can be spotty so I wanted something that could make phone calls over WiFi. Good decision on my part.

But I continued to use this phone as strictly a portable internet device. I don't think I used it to make my first phone call until 1 1/2 years later, this past January.

Tonight I needed to receive a text so I pulled out the manual to see what app does that. Activated it.

Decided to try it out by sending a text to a coworker who oftentimes never sees my emails in a timely manner and is always telling me to send her a text if it is important.

Here is my text (first ever on this phone) to her:

"....you are always telling me to text you. Have owned this phone for over two years and this is my first text ever on it. Extremely painful to type using only one finger with one half the time the wrong letter appearing. Are you receiving this? This may be both the start and finish of my texting career!

"Email reigns!

"This even way worse than I always dreaded it would be. This is PURE torture! Signing off for maybe forever!"


I wanted to add one more text to say: "In the time it took me to type all the above via text I could have typed in an email the entire War and Peace book!"

What a horrendous experience!

Vinny

Try dictating your text. Much easier if more than a couple of words to send. My iPhone enables dictation, not sure about other phone operating systems.

I'm sure it does. However, I always (like now) have two sound sources going on at the same time (one - C-Span, the other - Sports Talk radio). Therefore there'd be the annoyance factor of having to first turn both off while doing the dictation and then turning them both on again. Yes, not more than a few seconds work in each case but still annoying. On the other hand this and email never require me doing either of those.

I'll just continue to communicate to people to NOT call me or text me because, in general, my phone is going to be turned off. If you need to communicate with me send me an email.

I realize that I may be different from the general population in this (but probably not as much so within this group).

Yesterday I called my office phone to check on messages. I've been out of the office for nearly four months and this was the first time I was doing so.

I had 8 messages. Six of them were from April, from the same woman trying to sell me Accounts Receivable collection services with the other two being from June with another woman trying to sell me payroll services.

That was it for nearly four months!

ZERO true work related calls.

I've well trained all my work contacts that email is how we communicate. I also provide them with my personal email so one way or the other I'm either going to see messages via my work email address or my personal email address.

Vinny

[dualstow]

Tortoise, i think about this all the time.

• I agree on the sense of immediacy. There’s someone I use both email and texting (Signal app) with, and even though we have explicitly agreed that Signal should not signify the need for an urgent response, the feeling is sometimes there.

• Sending a long “email length” piece by text. Yeah, that’s weird and ungainly. Email was made for that.

• Texting a link to a long video: not so bad! I used to text back, “Thanks, i’ll take a look later.” Now i don’t even do that.

I do find messaging apps convenient because sometimes i don’t want my content stored by nosy Google/Gmail. I confess to using Telegram and Signal even for non-immediate communication.

[Tortoise]

Good points, dualstow.

In recent months, my brother and I have been texting each other much more, so one of the main reasons I don’t like him to text me links to long videos is because if I don’t watch the video immediately, it gets buried in an avalanche of subsequent texts and is a pain to look up later. By contrast, it’s much easier to go back and find something in my email inbox, especially if it’s only a day or two old.

In other words, at least with people who text me a lot, I view texts as a sort of transient, immediate communication stream to be consumed quickly and then discarded, generally not to be kept for searching through later.

[dualstow]

There's an easy fix for that. Copy the link to a txt file or an email to yourself. You can have one file or email thread called "Crap my brother sent me" or a separate file/email with a specific title relative to the link. Or an even more general file: "crap people send me."

The only downside is that once you do that, it gets easier to paste the link than to actually watch. Kind of like making lists instead of performing the tasks on those lists.
When it comes to watching video clips, falling behind is not necessarily a bad thing.

I often Telegram stuff to myself and hope to eventually put it in an organized file like that described above or to view it or read it.

The above is all with regard to your comment, "it's a pain to look up later."
This stuff will be buried in an avalanche whether you paste it or not. But it *will* be easier to find than scrolling through your phone screen.

[WiseOne]

It'll be interesting to see how all this plays out. One thing that's definitely changed and I think for the better: unplanned phone calls are now considered rude. You're supposed to text first to make sure the person is free to talk. This is not unlike the 1970s when answering machines were introduced. I remember many people were nervous about leaving voice messages. That took getting used to.

Also FYI, both texting and email are for us old fogies. Ditto Facebook. The high school and college age kids now use Snapchat or Instagram.

[vnatale]

It'll be interesting to see how all this plays out. One thing that's definitely changed and I think for the better: unplanned phone calls are now considered rude. You're supposed to text first to make sure the person is free to talk. This is not unlike the 1970s when answering machines were introduced. I remember many people were nervous about leaving voice messages. That took getting used to.

Also FYI, both texting and email are for us old fogies. Ditto Facebook. The high school and college age kids now use Snapchat or Instagram.

Are Snapchat and Instagram of creating polls, groups, multi-person communications?

We use Facebook for all of those - for our basketball group and softball team communications. And every music group has a Facebook page. No matter what age the group members.

Vinny

[dualstow]

Contractors always want to talk so that they can be hands free and I make every effort to not pick up. Can’t hear them, have no idea how to answer their questions, let alone on the fly. I take a message and then look it up...