Yesterday, I had a problem of a kind I seem to have often…and I'll bet some of you do, too. It has to do with people not understanding or remembering the limitations of technology.
I was talking to someone — my cell phone to their cell phone — and suddenly in mid-speech, the call was cut off. Dead air. When I redialed them, it went to voicemail. It took about five minutes to reconnect and when we did, the first thing this person said was, "Why did you hang up on me like that?"
It took about another five minutes to convince them that I hadn't; that cell phones are fallible and that they don't only cut off when you're driving through a tunnel or getting into an elevator. Even then, I'm not sure I did more than half-convince them.
I keep dealing with people who either forget or don't understand that sometimes, phones don't work right or text or e-mails disappear or stall out. We all curse our cell providers and say they all stink — Verizon, A.T.&T., T-Mobile, Sprint, all of them. But we often expect our messages to arrive instantly and our connections not to drop. I don't quite get that.
This problem came up a lot during the years when I was taking my dear friend Carolyn to hospitals for tests and treatment. At least half the time when I was in the rooms where they did radiation therapy on her, my cell phone said No Service. It was not connecting for what was sometimes an hour or more.
And then when I would go outside, I'd get a flurry of text messages or voicemails that had been sent 45 minutes earlier. Sometimes, there's be a series from someone: There would be the initial message and then, time-stamped ten minutes later, there'd be "Hello?" followed by one delivered ten minutes after that which would say, "WHY ARE YOU AVOIDING ME????"
This kind of thing has also happened when I wasn't in a "No Service" situation…where I was getting calls and texts and e-mails but someone's weren't coming through promptly or mine weren't. It seems to be fixed now but for a year or more, when Leonard Maltin sent me an e-mail, I would receive it with within a minute or so. And when I wrote back to him, it either bounced or took two days to arrive. Leonard, wise man that he is, understood. Not everyone does.
Quite a few people who text or write me seem to expect an immediate reply. But their messages sometimes don't arrive instantly for whatever reason.
Or they arrive and you don't see them immediately because you're asleep or in the shower or in an important meeting where you can't check your phone or on a treadmill in your doctor's office getting a stress test or in a "No Service" area or watching a play with your phone off or in the middle of sex or attending to some emergency that requires your complete, undivided attention or your phone's broken or you went out and accidentally left it home or it got stolen or all of these at the same time. An acquaintance of mine once got pissed at me because I didn't respond right away to a text message from him that arrived while I was in the middle of running the Quick Draw! panel at Comic-Con.
Sometimes, you just can't give someone a rapid response…and this also applies to e-mails and voice messages. It used to be that if someone phoned you and you didn't answer, the caller assumed you were away and didn't have an answering machine. Now, they presume you have your phone with you and if you don't pick up, your voicemail should.
Always remember that when your iPhone tells you a message you sent was delivered, that doesn't mean it was seen. And if it was seen, that doesn't mean the recipient was in position to answer you back then and there.
Do not allow any Abandonment Issues you may have to kick in. There are explanations besides someone trying to avoid talking to you. It is possible that someone wants to avoid talking to you but don't put that one first. Or second. Or even ninth. Unless you're really, really obnoxious in which case, yeah, they just don't want to talk to you…and I wouldn't blame them.