As a late boomer — and unlike most of my cohort — I’ve always hated talking on the telephone to someone. I’m sure part of it is my innate shyness and social awkwardness: if I can’t see how the other person reacts to my verbal blundering, how can I correct myself in time to salvage something from the call? As a result, I’m rather more sympathetic to younger Millennials and Gen Z’ers who have a common generational aversion to telephone calls:
“Candle-stick phone with courtesy pay box” by CodeName47km is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
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I’ve been working to wean myself off the phone. I try to use it only when it feels necessary: we require an answer now, things are too complex to lay out in an email, or I want to be sure what I’m saying is received as I intend it. Sometimes these calls are spontaneous. Increasingly, I schedule them, or ask permission first.
I’ve done this because it’s how business communications work today, and I don’t like to remind people that I’m getting on. I also do it in deference to my colleagues, all of whom are much younger than me. They prefer email, texts, or the group chat.
The landline decision was forced by our acquisition of Fitzhenry & Whiteside, which has had the same telephone number for decades. F&W has many more authors than does Sutherland House, and a good number of them are over sixty. We’re trying to make the transition to new ownership seamless. We didn’t want people calling up to hear “this number is no longer in service”. So the newly installed phone sits on a stand beside the desk I share with Shalomi. I call it Shalomi’s phone and make her answer it when she’s around. Mostly it goes to voicemail and tells people how to contact us by email.
Accustomed as I’ve become to phone-free work, I was taken aback this week when I asked one of our interns to call a printer — we needed a quick quote — and she responded, “I don’t do telephones”. She looked at me bewildered. I responded in kind.
My mind was racing to figure out if I’d mishandled the matter. I’d just read that story in the New York Times about the “Gen Z stare”, the blank look given by a young person (usually in a service job) where a verbal response would be common. It is often interpreted as a freeze on the part of the starer, an inability or reluctance to engage, perhaps rooted in anxiety, perhaps a remnant of the pandemic’s social dislocations, although some insist the starer is telling their interlocutor “you’re in my space and you ought to back off”.
I heard from a number of people about that article this week, and while the Times had not mentioned phone usage and etiquette, my conversations did. Apparently there are a lot of young people who don’t know how to answer their phones. They see a call pop up on their screen and they stare at it, waiting for it to go away. Or they press answer and listen without saying anything. Some, I’m told, answer even scheduled calls from people they know with silence.
I’ve heard parents say they didn’t expect they’d have to teach their children to answer a phone. A university lecturer explained that journalism professors now demonstrate use of a telephone before instructing students on how to conduct an interview over it. Apparently, the same goes for rookie salespeople.
Poking around online, I found a BBC article reporting that a quarter of people aged eighteen to thirty-four never answer their phones, more than half of them interpret any unexpected call as bad news. CBS reports 90 per cent of Gen-Z are anxious about phone calls.
In fairness, a lot of adults are similarly leery of their phones. They don’t want to engage with spam dialers or scammers — they answer and listen for the brief pause that betrays a call centre. Some let every unrecognized call go to voicemail. The savvier ones have figured out that your iPhone, properly configured, will send calls from people not in your contacts directly to voicemail.
Back to our intern. Eventually, I recovered myself. This wasn’t an instance of Gen-Z awkwardness or anxiety around real-time conversations. She is bright, confident, and as socially adept as anyone in the office. I asked if she had a phone. She did. I asked if she used it for calls. She said only to speak to her mom, who pays for her phone. Perfectly reasonable. And it was her personal phone, not a company phone, so she was under no obligation to use it at work. So we suggested she make the call on the company phone, which she cheerfully did.
We spoke later about generational differences with regard to communications technology. She likes the control one has over email communication as compared to the unpredictable nature of phone calls. I told her about life when no one had phones, yet we could all somehow manage to show up at the same place and the same hour. I can hardly believe I lived in such times. Hearing this must have hit her like I was once hit by the reporter Ray Stannard Baker’s account of how he used to walk up to the White House, knock on the front door, and ask to speak with the president.
One of my favorite subjects, and one of my pet peeves. Being the techno-Ludite that I am, I do not and will not have a cell phone. My wife does, and I notice that most people prefer to text. It’s more impersonal, and conveys only bare bones information. Texts could easily be done by some AI system. You can’t even be sure they’re from a real person. I rely on what passes for a land line these days. I have a primitive flip phone, but the only time I even have it with me is if I go out on a long bike ride, where I might need it for an emergency. Most of the time it sits with a dead battery somewhere on my desk. In a month’s time can count the number of actual phone calls I get on either device on the fingers of one hand. But the landline phone rings several times a day when I get spam calls from some clown speaking with a heavy accent, and trying to scam me. I’ll confess that sometimes I’ll pick up the phone just to berate and curse the creep on the other end. Phone scammers are thieves, so all the rules of civility and decency are off the table when dealing with them. I do my best to spoil their day. I have a couple of old friends who are even more low tech than I am. They like to call once in a while and shoot the shit, so when they do I’ll take the time to talk.
JWM
Comment by jwm — July 20, 2025 @ 14:38
I’ve had a smartphone since the iPhone3G, although I very rarely use it as a phone. It’s much more valuable to me as a web browser, email device, and all-around useful object … even knowing that it shares my location and other information about me on a moment-by-moment basis. I find the utility of the device worth the theoretical loss of privacy although others clearly do not.
We still have a landline, although I almost never answer it when it rings … somewhere between 50% and 90% of the calls there are scammers of one form or another. If I recognize the caller, I’ll pick up if I’m near the phone when it rings. Otherwise we’ll check for a message if it’s really for us.
Comment by Nicholas — July 20, 2025 @ 20:02