When my youngest was away at college, she had an evening job on campus. She would call me, and we would chit-chat about whatever, didn’t matter what, for the ten minutes it would take her to walk back to her dorm room at about that same time, ten or eleven o’clock. It made her feel better walking around by herself in the dark, and I was always happy to hear her voice.
I greatly dislike adjusting settings on my phone. At one point my phone was making all manner of buzzes overnight. So I changed something that quieted that. In the process, I may have muted something I might have preferred to stay on, but didn’t matter enough to me to try to tweak it. But I actually believe my phone WOULD ring at night if someone called me - IF I hadn’t put it on silent during some event and forgotten to later turn silent off.
Many folk do not appreciate how others appreciated that they did not have to adjust the settings on their wall phone to make it work as desired. (Yes, I acknowledge that a cellphone does much more than an old phone. But the idea of having to manage and customize a cellphone is a meaningful - and unwelcome - distinction to me.)
Yep. I’m an email guy. Next to nothing goes on in my life that has to be responded toimmediately. And if you don’t use email, well, I’ll see you when and if I see you.
I guess I would like to receive those. Glad I didn’t receive such calls. Thinking about it, tho, depending on the severity of the accident, perhaps they could’ve waited until morning.
I much prefer e-mails to text. Not only am I terrible at using a cell phone virtual keyboard (I literally still use one index finger…and a fat one at that), but I prefer to compose in a format that is more similar to an actual letter. Text is just not very good for that, IMO.
My laptop is usually just as available as my phone when I’m at home. And I have all six of my e-mail accounts on my cell phone, so I can receive and read all my e-mails whether I have my laptop or just my phone.
Finally, I have no children. My parents are gone. If someone wants to reach my wife, she usually has her cell phone nearby. I’m retired. I have moderate to severe hearing loss, so I don’t really like to use my cell phone for voice calls any way (unless I have my BT hearing aids in). For a wide variety of reasons, I came to the conclusion that I just don’t get any advantage to keeping my cell phone near me on a routine basis.
So your home phone didn’t ring at night right out of the box?
Not sure I quite understand the humor. But “back in the day”, the expectation was that people wouldn’t call after a certain time at night. 
My 33 year old kid was in town over the weekend. We were discussing how much we preferred being young people - I in the 60s-70s, her in the 90s-00s - NOT being in constant touch with everyone. Again, just personal preference.
Today the expectation is that people don’t call at all, they just text 
I never “learned,” really. I held out against getting a smartphone for way too long, not getting my first until November 2020. (Before then I just had a flip phone for the car in case of emergency.) What really got me hooked on the cell phone is voice to text, which is shockingly effective.
I’ll go back and punch it up after dictating, like for example with this post I manually added in the quote marks and parentheses. And of course I’ll try to correct any errors I spot, but otherwise I don’t actually type on my phone. I’ve become a big fan of not typing. So much so that I almost exclusively read and post to the SDMB from my phone, which is quite nice.
Oddly, even though I can check my email from my phone, I almost never do. That’s my one old-school holdout that stays on the computer. Unfortunately, that means I barely check either of my personal email accounts anymore. (One anonymous for stuff like the dope, one with my real name for the bank and whatnot.)
Yes. And a lot of people will text at anytime of the day or night, since I can text you at 2 am and you can answer when you wake up at 9 am. Which means I have to figure out how I want to set up notifications on my phone- do I never want to be notified of a text/call , do I not want to be notified between 11 am and 6am, do I not want to be notified between 11 and 6 unless it’s from specified numbers. I don’t want to go back to the days before cell phones - but I would like to go back to the days where people didn’t basically say it’s my own fault if their non-emergency text woke me up at 2am because I should know how to turn off notifications.
The accident was fairly bad, both my daughter and her friend were in the ER. I got the call around midnight and headed over. (thankfully, no drugs or alcohol were involved, just bad driving). She was only 17 or 18 at the time, I definitely had to be there.
Yes. I have a medical condition that causes me to go into anaphylaxis randomly. I always have my phone and epipens within easy reach. Even when swimming.
I use Google Messages on a computer so I can use an actual keyboard. I assume iPhones have this feature as well. I typically carry my phone, but I don’t have to have it to send and receive text messages.
I’ve seen that on a Mac, but if I can do it from my computer, I don’t know how.
https://messages.google.com/ will work for Androids (at least mine which is using the Google Fi phone service).
Hitting the “volume down” button a few times on the way to bed and “volume up” button a few times when you wake up is not that big of a challenge.
I had misunderstood from your original post, referring to your kids as now being “young adults.” When my kids were 17-18, I definitely was more alert to the potential need for late night calls than once they went to college. I regularly told them, if they ever needed a call, they could call me at any time, with no repercussions at the time (tho possible discussions in the morning. At the time, we always had landlines they could call. I presume if they were young now, I’d be more careful about NOT having my phone silenced.
And I regularly told them, just don’t have us pick you up at the hospital or police station. (I know, some things may be beyond their control.) Fortunately, I never had to do either.
We never gave our kids curfews, because we would generally go to sleep before the curfew, and could no tbe counted upon to wake whenever they came in.
Also, our kids did not have their own cars until after college, and had very limited use of ours - certainly not for just going out at night.
The challenge with that would be remembering - but also , it doesn’t work if I want to be notified when certain people text in the middle of the night or when I get a phone call at 2 am from an unknown number (which is likely to be the police or a hospital). It’s possible that there’s a way to set my phone up so I’m notified of calls from unknown numbers without being notified of all calls - but I’ve sure never seen it.
I’m really not sure why certain people seem to think that I should have to figure out how to set up my phone so I am only notified of certain texts and calls just because it’s convenient for them to text/call me at 2am.
On my phone, that simply changes the volume of all notifications, which makes it difficult to answer both (emergency) calls and regular texts. If I’m not going to be awakened by either one, I might just as well leave the phone in the other room. There’s probably a more sophisticated answer to the problem, but I think the simplest one is for the person sending the text to demonstrate thoughtfulness and courtesy.
Unfortunately, my stepdaughter is one of those people who sees no difference between 1:00 PM and 1:00 AM. If her phone tells her it’s my birthday at 12:01 AM, she will compose a long text wishing me a good birthday and send it immediately. I appreciate the thought, but…
Silly you. Because what previous generations understood to be a tool for communication is actually supposed to be your hobby, to be continually managed and updated. And because people can contact you easily at any time without considering your preferences, you ought to either welcome such interruptions or study up on how to minimize them.
That’s also not a thing you could do with a landline, so I don’t understand your complaint.
I thought the goal was to prevent “buzzes and beeps” throughout the night. If you want to allow calls and disallow other stuff, then yeah, that takes about 5 seconds of tinkering with a menu.