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Sunday, November 01, 2009

Phone-phobic

I am totally phone-phobic. I hate it and do everything I can to avoid using it. This is one of the reasons it amazes me that people spend like every minute in their cars on their cell phones. Hello? This is the place you can go to get away from the damn phone. (I do own a cell phone, but it's never turned on and I never think to check for messages. Once, I found a voice mail from a friend from months earlier on it. Talk about embarrassing.)

Tracing back my dislike of the phone gets murky. I know I hated it in high school because I had a job after school where I spent four hours a day on the phone, placing calls to stores. There's a good chance, though, that I hated the phone before that because I have a vague memory of not calling my friends in junior high and not exactly being thrilled when they called either. In fact, I have pretty clear memories of giving short answers in the hope the other person would end the call faster.

Imagine that--a teenage girl who didn't like spending hours on the phone. My parents didn't know how good they had it. :-)

This phone aversion has continued. For instance, right now, I have a iPod speaker dock thing that isn't working. I ordered it from Woot, and only read their return policy after the fact. It's basically deal with the manufacturer and only if that fails will we allow you to return the item at your cost. Um, nice. This is going to make me think twice before buying from them in the future, but it leaves me with a problem--now I have to contact the manufacturer.

I tried their website first. No help there on making the speaker dock work. They offered an email for help option and I jumped on that one. The response came quickly enough, offered a few suggestions, and then said if nothing here helped, that I should call customer service. I have a reference number.

Call! Gah!

If I wanted to make a phone call, I would have done that to begin with. I don't. So now I've spent about a week trying to psyche myself up. Yes, it takes me time to build up enough courage to pick up the phone. Sometimes too long and I've been known to let things slide indefinitely because of my phone-phobia. Of course, I have a tendency to let anything I don't want to deal with slide.

While I work to reach a point where I can call customer service, I have a messy kitchen, the box for the iPod dock/speakers is on top of my island. The directions are open on my dining room table. The dock itself and a couple of spare iPod trays are on my china hutch. I want that stuff gone and I can't make it go away until I use the phone! Makes me wonder what will win out--my dislike of clutter or my dislike of the phone.

Stay tuned.