I don’t like talking on the phone either. I don’t understand people who do it constantly, especially people on a fairly long bus ride talking for the entire bus ride. Even more puzzling when it happens at 1 AM. I can understand being on the bus and making a quick phone call to someone telling them when you’re coming home, but why would someone on the bus talk for a long time at 1 AM? Unless maybe they’re talking to someone in another time zone.
Another dinosaur here- my MA talks on her phone, and the work phone, and rooms patients, and assists me, and does her job. Her personal phone calls frequently involve her avocation, which is mastiff rescue, so I usually find those interesting if I can hear them ;). Point is, she/we don’t let her personal communications interfere with her paid work.
I have a pay as you go flip phone as well, FairyChatMom, but I have to keep it current because it’s that or a damn pager, for work. It’s on buzz. When I’m not at work it’s on the charger in my car, as the real reason I have a cell phone at all is so when I hit a deer I can call AAA.
This summer we had a 19 year old stay with us to help with haying etc- I’m still wondering if he wasn’t trying to take a picture when he backed the hayrake into a ditch. I thought learning to drive something without power steering and learning to weld would be a Good Thing, versus never letting go of the phone thing. So many of the constant texters are seriously deconditioned 
So I’m ringing up a purchase for a customer chatting on the phone about a coffee cake recipe, and I ask her a question. She apologizes to the person on the phone before she answers me! WTF? I am standing in front of you, a living person trying to do my job, but the idiot on the phone gets an apology? SHEESH!
Quite often at my office, there are zero empty conference rooms because they are all in use. Going outside means going down 40 floors in an elevator. If my doctor is finally calling me back about something important, I’m damn well going to talk to my doctor. She is probably calling me during her 2-minute interval before her next patient comes in.
I did not say that every single personal phone call has to be made in total privacy. A 30-second phone call is much different from a 20-minute phone call. A phone call where you have to give out very personal information is much different than a phone call where all you have to say is, “thank you, bye.”
Sometimes they get irritated, too! I think you know I have somewhat of a toxic family. So when a call comes in from one of them I wince. I have to prepare.
A little while ago my aunt called me and left an urgent message on my phone. I called her back the next morning and she complained I hadn’t answered the phone. Thing is, the news, while important, wasn’t urgent. My real mom had died. But she had died 12 days before! We’d missed the wake and everything else. I didn’t need to drop everything and call her right away!
Asto personal calls on work, yes, this is a personality issue. I don’t like people knowing my personal business, not even the most benign of calls, but sometimes I will take them at my desk because it means I can keep working through the call. I don’t have a door and it’s hard for me to find a place to go to shut the door and talk.
But some peple can be so annoying! And it’s always the people with no volume control!
“It may be grounds for discipline or termination, but it is in no way stealing.”
If you’re a non-exempt person, the employer’s free to consider it “stealing” (larceny, by way of unauthorized taking of dough paid to work and you aren’t working, with common sense exceptions for going to the bathroom (the law in exceedingly few places obligating them to allow you to take breaks for any other reason).
If you’re exempt, employer is obligated to pay you for working even if you only work 60 seconds. (It’s free to charge you leave for time spent on personal stuff if the expectation is that you put in X hours working a week or day, however.)