Ok, this is a sidetrack, but I’m intrigued. What religion prohibits cell phones, and for what reasons? I can only imagine sects or cults that strictly control their members.
I’m always text before call. Makes it so much easier to make sure it’s not at a bad time. 95% of the time, texting is better than talking anyway
When I was a kid, lo those many years past, schools had their own prefix so you could tell just by seeing the number.
I often find a two minute phone call much more efficient than five minutes of texting back and forth, especially if the texter types like a 5 year old with broken fingers.
I almost never make personal calls during the day when most people are at work. Phone calls are for evenings when people tend to be lazing around the house.
I’m gonna guess Amish - people think of them as being in Pennsylvania
but they are also in New York, Ohio, Indiana … About 30 states altogether.
Ah, yes, I forgot about the Amish. That makes sense.
Now, I think it’s freaky to get out of sorts when someone just shows up. It happens in my neighborhood with some frequency – a neighbor child selling Girl Scout cookies or wrapping paper for the band, a volunteer handing out info on some candidates in the next election, a city employee informing people the water’s going to be turned off for an hour or so, someone trying to sell us lawn service…
I don’t know if it’s etiquette or not, but if you want me to answer my door, you will tell me you are coming by. I don’t answer the door for random people. I also don’t answer the phone if I don’t know who you are. If you can’t leave a voicemail, it isn’t that important.
If you want to reach me in real time, send a text. I will get back to you when I can, typically within the hour.
I think a few things come into play. In the old style land line, it was in a room in the home. The cell phone is in my pocket. It feels like an invasion of personal space. Add to that the sheer number of telemarketing / scam / phishing calls, and incoming phone calls are rarely important.
I also work in customer service, and most days I am at my limit of talking. If you want a response from me, send a text.
I’m making assumptions here, because I haven’t asked. But I know a number of Old Order Mennonites and Amish, and they generally don’t have cell phones (there are a lot of different types of Mennonites and many aren’t Old Order.) I can take two guesses as to why, but again I haven’t asked: One is that carrying a phone around all the time means that one’s always open to disruption from the world in general, as opposed to being able to concentrate on the home, farm, workshop, etc. at hand; and the other is that modern phones are all more or less internet capable, and in addition to that first factor the internet has a whole lot of things on it that Plain People in general (there are some others in addition to Mennonites and Amish) want to avoid.
There are a lot more Mennonites and Amish than there used to be, and they’re in a lot more areas.
I’ve got sympathy with the phone resistance. I was highly reluctant to carry a phone in the fields, and only started carrying one when not travelling when it became clear that my health isn’t what it was; while I’m not expected to have imminent serious trouble, I decided I wasn’t any longer happy about frequently being alone, out of sight of anyone likely to come by, and a couple of thousand feet away from any way to call for help. I try to forget that I’ve got the phone with me. When I’m out in the fields, I want to be there, not to have half my head somewhere else.
Ugh. I don’t like phones in general, and cell phones in particular. Two interactions–a text and a call, would drive me nuts.
We are the last home of three on a private road. Maybe once every three years a driver will show up lost. Any salespeople typically reach the first home where the couple copy the license on the car, report them to the local police, etc.
Someone knocking on our door freaks me out, but it only has happened a few times in the past fifteen years.
People can turn off their phones, but that would mean making it where absolutely no one could get a hold of them, even in emergencies. So most people I know don’t.
They will, however, put texts on silent, since texts are almost never emergencies.
I don’t want to get too maudlin, but I will say there was a certain family emergency where I was very relieved my sister doesn’t turn off her phone at night.
I think whether it depends on what sort of area you live in - someone who thinks someone showing up unannounced is freaky would have a hard time living in my neighborhood. In addition to the Girl Scouts selling cookies, people telling me the water/gas will be turned off, people trying to get signatures and so on there are also neighbors knocking either asking to borrow or returning tools , giving me my packages or asking if I have theirs. But - I live in an urban neighborhood, where the distance from my front door to the public sidewalk is twenty feet at most and the distance between my house and the one next door is less than four feet. It’s just as easy for my next door neighbor to knock on my door to see if I got his package as it is to call me and then come over. That sort of delivery isn’t even going to happen if my driveway is a quarter-mile long.
One of our neighbors has an electric golf cart she uses to visit her neighbors. She is not disabled.
If I wanted to, I could walk out our front door naked, go to the barn, stop by the pond to feed the fish and ducks, then return to the house, all without risk of being seen.
Now it’s all cells, so they could have any number. Robocalls can also spoof local numbers.
I’m a parent. I have to be available. Some of it is junk.
I’m the last of three on a public dead-end road. The nearest house is 700 feet along the road; it’s considerably further to a house in any other direction.
My neighbors sometimes show up unannounced, having walked across the fields.
I could probably get away with it; but most of said neighbors are Old Order Mennonite, and they’d be pretty surprised if they did come by at the wrong moment. I doubt I’d hear a word about it directly – they’d most likely just turn around and go rapidly in the other direction – but I expect I’d be a topic of discussion!
– I run a direct market farm, and am the primary contact person for one of the local farmers’ markets. I answer calls from unfamiliar numbers, if it’s convenient for me to pick up the phone right then; and I check my voice mail (as well as my email, and any texts I get) at least daily. But I’ve long since given up dashing for the phone when it’s awkward to do so. Leave a message.
Huh, I wasn’t thinking of those sorts of knocks. Yes, I do get those quite a lot too, but they’re not from people expecting to come in to the house. My neighbours don’t have my phone number, so if they want to ask or tell me something - next door’s kid has knocked his ball into my garden, so can I throw it back, so-and-so’s cat is missing, and, pre-covid, a lot of parcels because I work from home and often used to take neighbours’ parcels in - they have to knock on the door.
That’s the kind of thing that generally needs to be done in person anyway. And yes, we are urban, in a normal English terraced house so with zero gap between my house and theirs and zero between my place and the street.
That argument has been addressed on this board before…I believe the full paragraph needs repeating:
You do have a phone wich implies you WANT to be called.
I have a butthole, too, but that doesn’t imply I want a running jigsaw inserted into it. Oh, but hey, you’ve got a VCR, so clearly that implies you want me to come into your house and put on a German Scheisse video while your mother is visiting. You’ve got a drawer full of silverware, too, so that implies you want someone to saw on the webbing between your fingers with red-hot butter knives while someone else scoops out your eyeballs with your grapefruit spoons. Right?
My boyfriend is from a small town in the very south of Italy and the whole tradition of dropping by has definitely not died down there. Whenever we go there a neverending stream of family and friends will knock at any and all times. I’m from the Netherlands and also kind of introverted, so it drives me nuts sometimes, while at the same time l can also see how it’s nice to have that kind of warmth and community.
About phoning without texting, to me it’s not rude to call without texting, though I often prefer texts because they give me time to think about the reply rather than putting me on the spot.