How often do you hear from your SO at work?

In My Humble Opinion
41

It was 6 years ago that I was last married. My wife and I used to only talk when something unusual came up - a sick child, a delay that meant she couldn’t or I couldn’t meet some expected time for picking up kids. Once in a while we may ring for some sentimental reason - happy birthday, happy anniversary. But generally maybe less than 10 times a year.

I don’t think most of my friends even know my work number and the last call I answered on my mobile at work was about 2 months ago.

The woman who sits next to me at work probably talks 10 times a day to friends and family members but she likes chatting on the phone and I just don’t.

42

We share a vehicle. He is self employed. Unless we talk during the day, I have no idea what time he will pick me up.

ETA - it isn’t “chatting” - it’s “I’m at the Mobile - ready?” “Yep.”

43

I would say, on average, one of us calls the other during work hours (between 8 and 5 pm) about 1-2 times a month. My children do call me at work occasionally, maybe once a week. They are at home by themselves and most times it’s not terribly important.

I work in a small office with two cow-orkers. One gets called by her live-in boyfriend and other friends about 20+ times a day. It gets annoying. I know she also occasionally calls him, almost always at the house, about 3-5 times a day. I don’t think she calls him at his work, at least not from our work. He works second shift so there is not much overlap. They are both in their mid to late 40s, so this is not a young crush kind of thing.

My other cow-orker is 50ish and her kids call her at work a lot, though nearly not as often as the first cow-orker. This is mostly on her cellphone. Her mother also usually calls here 1-3 times a day, sometimes on the work phone (I assume she calls in on our tollfree number as she lives across the state). She takes a lot of cigarette breaks and is on the phone as often as not on those breaks. Sometimes she takes her cigarette breaks inside. I find this more annoying than the phone calls.

44

We don’t call each other, but send text messages once or twice a day. There’s always the “good morning” messages, then the occasional “how’s your day going? love ya” later in the day.

Neither of us have desk jobs, so text messages are handy. It isn’t something that has to be answered right away, so it waits 'til we have more time free, and it doesn’t bother anyone else.

Edit: Ah we also don’t live together. Usually we just see each other on weekends.

45

DeHusband calls me twice a day. During his breaks.

Why? He’s got deep vein thrombosis several years ago and he got tired of me asking if he kept moving during the day. So he started calling to prove that he was actually walking around the block a few times every morning and afternoon. Now it’s a habit.

46

It varies. Couple times a week maybe. She works in a different department (in a differnt town). So sometimes its business related.

Sometimes emails.

She is home now, babysitting our dry wallers (Idid it last week). I should probably call to see how it’s going.

47

I would say my husband and I call each other at work about every 6 months. Almost every time has been to say one of the kids is on the way to the doctor or the hospital. If he needs me to pick up something on my way home from work, he’ll call my cell once he knows I’ve punched out for the day.

48

Because we’re in luuuuuurve. Seriously. My work is largely boring, he’s always interesting. We talk for maybe 5 minutes, to share how our respective days are going and decide what to have for dinner, maybe share a funny incident or cool news story. As I said earlier, hearing from him is often the brightest point in my workday.

49

About 3-4 times a week, depending how busy we are. I don’t answer my phone period when in meetings, so even if it were my boss she’d get the machine, and there are times when taking a personal call is inconvenient, so we tell each other so. Otherwise it’s no big deal. I’m happy to hear from him, and my family is my priority. I extend the same courtesy to my employees. I have no issue with them taking personal calls as long as they don’t extend more than a few minutes, and as long as they please if they are on their own cell.

I have to go through a receptionist to call him, but oh well. If I feel I need to talk to him, I’ll do what I need to to do so.

50

We talk maybe once or twice a week, almost always it’s her ringing me to expand on something we’re IMing about. We IM almost every day.

The guy who sits across the partition from me is hardly ever off the phone, sometimes he has two going at once. About 1 call in 4 he gets is his wife, and more often than not she’s ringing him from the car to get driving directions. I don’t know what drives me the craziest, that she’d interrupt him (he’s a senior manager) for information she could just as easily get out of a street directory, or the he doesn’t seem to mind.

51

Once a week, if that. And never to just say “hi”. It’s always to ask me something or tell me something he might otherwise forget. A phone call lasts, on average, 45 seconds to a minute.

52

If she’s at home, I’ll call her once a week or so, usually to find out if she needs anything since I’m stopping by the store on the way home (or something similarly mundane). I do try to get home and see her at lunchtime, since I live four minutes from my office.

When she’s at work, I don’t call unless there’s something really important up, because she’s usually running her ass off and her employers try to discourage personal calls.

My partner has 10-minute mundane conversations with his girlfriend three or four times a day. A couple of my nurse practitioners get a call at least once an hour from their husbands or their kids. To each his own, I guess.

53

I think “to each his own” works if the following conditions are met:

  • nobody’s work is suffering (this means both members of the couple, and also people you’re working with who need to talk to you, but you’re never available because you’re always on the phone with your SO or kids)
  • nobody within earshot of you is suffering
  • meetings are not interrupted
  • your personal calls don’t interrupt other people’s work (like a receptionist, unless said receptionist doesn’t mind answering personal calls in addition to the business calls she must answer)

If these are all met, go nuts. Get a headset and talk to each other for eight hours every day.

54

My wife has called me maybe seven or eight times while I’ve been at work in the last two years. What’s that funny little word? Emergency? That’s it.
But we’re also the people without cell phones who miss the times when people didn’t track you down unless they needed to.

55

When I’m working as a receptionist, which I do sporadically for my sister-in-law, I hear from Himself once or twice a day, usually to inform me whether or not he can make it to lunch. (He’s a car salesman, and if there’s a customer in front of him, lunch can go hang.)

When I’m at home and he’s at work, I sometimes hear from him a lot. Really a lot, like ten or 12 times a day (these are 13 hour days). The thing is, he gets bored. If there isn’t a customer actually in front of him, or there isn’t something he has to do, and it’s a slow day, he does things like drive used cars through the carwash, or drive trucks to the gas station to fill up, or go out and start a bunch of cars so that the batteries don’t die. These tasks are mind-numbing and time-consuming. He has a phone with him, so he calls someone to pass the time. It turns out that the person he most wants to talk to is me.

I call him occasionally at work, and always on his cell phone, but mostly I’ll e-mail him if I have something to tell him. I rarely go through the receptionist, but once I was in the middle of a truly hysterical emergency, and he wasn’t picking up his cell, and I called the switchboard. I found out later that the receptionist literally ran through the building trying to find him, because she knew that if I called and said I had to talk to him RIGHT THIS MINUTE, I was into something serious.

For normal circumstances, we have an agreement that if one of us is at work and we have to go, “Gotta go.” <click> is an acceptable form of goodbye. I don’t leave customers standing and waiting to make dental appointments while I chat about what I’ll make for dinner, and he isn’t rude to his customers. Neither of us is inconsiderate in this way to co-workers, either.

So it’s maybe something you don’t understand, but as long as we’re polite about it and not affecting the bottom line, I don’t see why it should bug anybody.

56

We text each other pretty much constantly, all the work-day long. I work in a vault by myself, and if he’s at his part-time job instead of his real one, he’s generally bored. One day we’re going to run out of things to say, and Verizon is going to go bankrupt.