Yes, if you remove the part of the country in which more people live, the remaining number is more rural.
Two words: flyover country.
Saying that the whole country is 20% rural is useful, if not exact. But posters have gone on to specifically say that flyover country is 20% rural, and that’s just wrong.
Yes, I said that if fenced and gated.
I don’t even call people these days without texting them first and making sure they can take a call. Yeah, that may be overkill but I’ve got plenty of time.
19% of 330 million is well over 62 million people. That’s a lot of Americans.
No, only if i post a sign, or put up a gate. Something many people do.
I’m pretty sure a sign is sufficient.
And in non-emergency situations, the utility people arrange to come at a time that’d convenient to the homeowner. They don’t just trespass my property.
Yes, and you also said this
I’m not sure you ( or anyone else) have any idea exactly how common fences/gates/enclosures are in urban/suburban areas. But certainly they are common enough that “quite rare” doesn’t fit.
And it’s also not uncommon for the type of enclosure to be irrelevant for trespass statutes, so that it doesn’t have to be a fence - a brick or stone wall with an opening counts as “enclosed” in at least some places.
I think this has become rather normal. I know a lot of my friends will text me before calling these days. I’d guess about half of them. And I personally have trended towards the same.
I mean, it’s not just rural people who have fenced off private property between them and their front door. Every apartment in Manhattan has a locked door to the building that you have to get past before you can knock on the door of an individual dwelling.
I am that buddy to a friend I have had since I was 12. We learned how to hunt, fish, chase girls and smoke weed together but went our separate ways after our early 20s. I have maybe actually gave him advance notice of my coming over maybe twice in our lives, as we always just sort of saw each other all the time when we when we were kids and it was our routine.
Now we are in our 60s and still see each other every year a two a couple times with no notice, and we like it that way. Gives us things to catch up on over a few drinks or a smoke.
A no soliciting sign seems not to be. A no trespassing sign might be.
I did not say a fence was rare, i said a private street is rare.
Due in part to my hearing loss, I don’t like talking on the phone. Everyone in my contacts knows this about me, so they text.
Maybe once a year someone will call me and leave a voicemail, which I read at my leisure. There’ll be a rambling message without real information: “Hey, buddy I need to talk with you about something and it’s drawn out and complicated, can we talk? Call me.”
I send a text that says “No”. Then a second text that says, “I’ll help you via text.”
So far everyone has been ably to comply.
My phone is effectively impossible to text or read anything of any length on. I could email you, though. Or, in a pinch, write you a letter.
I have a friend who rarely checks her email, and relies on texting (or on phone calls, but the timing doesn’t always work). There’s a workaround, though: if I text “email” to her, she’ll check her email. That much texting, I can manage.
Can you voice to text on it. It’s not perfect, often picks up background words.
Doesn’t fix your reading it problem.
Just sayin’
That’s one of those senior-moment things I’ve had a little trouble adjusting to attitude-wise. After some very slight resistance early-on I’ve adapted to texting everything without an issue (getting a smart phone with a keyboard solved my problem with how slow it once was for me to laboriously tap out a message without 8 errors). But the mild animosity to being called at all or being asked to text before calling honestly mystifies me. I have learned to comply as society demands, because society increasingly demands it 
. But having grown up pre-cell phone and even pre-answering machine, it’s a slightly weird cultural shift to me. So relaxing to be able to call my 80-something year old father and know he doesn’t give a shit about whether I call or text and usually prefers I just call 
.
But when in Rome, I guess…
Maybe. There’s some stuff in it under “accessibility”. But there’s nothing obvious about talking to the text function; and I haven’t found it necessary to try to figure it out. I haven’t had a situation in which somebody was insisting on communicating only by text but more than a few words were necessary – and, as you say, that might not help anyway if that situation did come up.
Incidentally, the people I call without texting (or call at all, really) are all older generations. I call my grandmother and my Aunt, that’s about it. I usually text my Aunt before calling, but it wouldn’t be unheard of or weird for me to call without texting.
But the number of people I routinely speak on the phone with is …two. the vast majority of the people in my life are text only.
And I guess we periodically FaceTime with my husband’s Mom and sister’s family. But that’s always arranged via text first.
My gf works from home, so she’ll be typing away, then asks Siri to text aunt Jean and it all goes flawlessly. When the text is finished, Siri call mom.
My neighbors and nearby friends drop in regularly. Bringing flowers or cookies, or coming to pet the baby goats with a child, or asking if my dog would like to go on a walk with them, or needing to tell me that they are going to visit their mom and could I keep an eye on their sheep, or someone drove into a ditch and could we come down with the tractor.
I mean this is about daily. And sometimes people drive up and stop to stare at our house because their grandparents lived there once (the house is 235 years old and in that time it appears everyone in a twenty mile radius either lived there or has a story about it). Sometimes I even invite them in but that’s rare.
People don’t text because wifi is so sketchy much of the time I won’t get it until they’re already here.
It is impossible for me to ever be in the OP’s position because I have no relatives within 3000 miles (by design) and deep-cleaning to the extent that my house is temporarily uninhabitable is beyond my dreams. Anyway, I would have asked my theoretical niece to go get some takeout for us all and come sit in the yard.
Heh, I’m not a big fan of the phone, and if I don’t want to talk right now, I just don’t answer.
Pro tip: If you want me to call you back, leave a message. Also, the message will have to be about why you are calling. If it’s just a message bitching about how I never pick up the phone, whatever you were calling about is absolutely unimportant, and I’m not calling back.
Can someone point me to where in this thread “Randy Quaid” has been mentioned? I can’t find it in a quick scan but surely it must be here somewhere.