I came home yesterday utterly exhausted and burnt out from stress. Several times a week, I sit up, scowl, and frantically rummage through my bag. These two facts are related, in that both of them involve using the phone. I despise using the phone. I've felt that way long enough that I think I can't write it off as hormones or fits of pique (to which I'm not prone anyway).
The reasons might be severalfold, really. First, my concentration is rather delicate. The phone going off shatters my focus on what I was doing. That's annoying to pick up later, because I'll probably have lost my train of thought. Second, the phone going off heralds that I'm going to have to talk to someone I probably don't know, about whatever it is they want. My phone doesn't have the ability to tell me who's calling, and from where. As such, every conversation is a wild card. Also, unfortunately, people don't always leave their names and numbers on the voicemail box, and even if they do, I still have to call them back. The whole thing just spikes my anxiety levels.
Finally, phone calls are at an uncomfortable midpoint between textual communication, like email and instant messaging, and in-person communication. With text, all I need to worry about are the words. With in-person communication, I have lots of redundant forms of data with which to analyze the conversation. A person's words, tone, body language, emotional state, and expression all factor in. Granted, as a person on the spectrum I can only process a fraction of each of those. Still, given enough data, even I can piece together a general impression of the situation.
Phones give tone of voice, emotional state, and words without the rest of the contextual information I rely on to translate those things. I always feel like I'm floundering during a phone call, even if my voice and demeanor are perfectly professional. Multiply that times 40, then stuff it into the space of a few hours, and that's my workday.
I don't like making phone calls.. you may have heard of that phrase some phone company came up, "reach out and touch somebody", so 90% of the time I feel like I'm reaching out and touching somebody that does not want to be touched. Because of vision problems I am very good at reading people's voices (in fact a lot of times I recognize people more by their voice than their face even now) so I can tell when people are bothered. That being said I do much better over the phone than face to face partially because I work remote so have more experience having important interactions over the phone than in person. Plus I never know where to put my eyes and am awkward in other ways in person.
ReplyDeleteThat must be tough for you having to make all those calls though.