Saturday evening my bicycle trunk bag fell off the rear rack. As soon as I realized it, I retraced my route, but no luck.
Sunday night, I see a posting on my local Chicago subreddit saying FOUND Bike Bag. chance to reclaim your stuff. It points me to a Craigslist ad where the finder has taken the trouble to look up the bag model and include a photo. The ad says “There is a name on the bag. If you can tell me the name on the bag, i will return the bag and its contents.”
What’s the issue, you say? The luggage tag hanging from the bag also includes my address and phone number. The finder is an intelligent young fellow, by all appearances, who lives just down the street. Why would he think it preferable to go to all the effort of creating two different online postings (and even talking to the police about what to do) rather than JUST DIALING THE FRIGGIN’ PHONE NUMBER? I replied through both Craigslist and Reddit, again giving my phone number, and eventually he replied through the Craigslist anonymous email system. Yesterday he dropped the bag off with my doorman.
I’m very grateful for his honesty and his efforts, and I now have the bag back, so I shouldn’t whine at all. But is this a generational thing, that actually talking to a person on the phone is best avoided?
I’m mildly phobic about talking to strangers on the phone. I have no idea why, since I’m perfectly happy to stand up in front of a hundred people and bluff my way through a presentation, but the idea of talking to one person I don’t know on the phone causes anxiety. I usually make my wife order pizzas and make appointments for me.
The Internet, which would never lie to me, claims that there are a large number of folks with a much more severe version of the same phobia; about 5% if you can extrapolate from those British folk: Telephone phobia - Wikipedia
I wonder if the person was trying to avoid seeming creepy. Or has been accused of such in the past.
For example, when I was in college, I found a fellow student’s ID card on the sidewalk. My first thought was “Oh, I can look her number up in the campus directory, call her, and give her the ID back”, but I realized that might seem a little invasive of privacy (“How’d you get my card? Where’d you get my number? Who are you anyway!?”). I ended up giving it to student services.
A few years later, some friends and I were getting a movie night together, and one of our friends was late. So, I looked her number up on Facebook, and called her to see if she was still coming. The first question out of her mouth was “How did you get my number?”. I noticed the next day that she had taken it off of facebook, and a few days later her boyfriend told me not to try poaching his girlfriend. (My thought was, if you don’t want people calling your phone, don’t put your phone number on facebook. We were facebook friends at the time even).
So, maybe the dude has been burned by overly paranoid people before, and just wants to avoid that again. Personally, I would have turned it into the cops, but who knows how long it would be until they decided to take it to your door.
Maybe he was bored and wanted an “adventure” or something. Granted, not my idea at a fun time, but at some level it gives you a purpose - and if all you have to do is dial a number - well maybe he wanted more foreplay.
There does seem to be an aversion among younger people in using the phone to make calls.
I don’t think you guys are thinking about this the right way. Your phone-phobia thing makes sense–except that he could have texted. If it were a house phone, it would just be converted to speech. He could just avoid answering the phone if the guy called, and just listen to the message, responding back via text. And perhaps told him that contacting him via email or text was more likely to get a hold of him.
No, I think it’s much more likely that the guy was doing the minimum he thought he morally had to do to inform the owner, hoping that no one would reply, and he’d get to keep it. All the stuff in the email is just to make it sound like he did a lot more.
“I’m mildly phobic about talking to strangers on the phone. I have no idea why, since I’m perfectly happy to stand up in front of a hundred people and bluff my way through a presentation, but the idea of talking to one person I don’t know on the phone causes anxiety. I usually make my wife order pizzas and make appointments for me.”
TimeWinder, you have no idea how relieving this post was to me. I am the same way, and have been for nearly four decades; I HATE talking to someone I don’t know on the phone. I make my wife order pizzas, and will procrastinate endlessly to avoid calling any business, no matter the reason. Not a severe anxiety (I can, and do make the calls, I just strongly prefer not to). I think it has to do with visual cues- they are missing in a call. If I know you, I have a good idea of what your meanings are, and the visual cues I can imagine. If I don’t have them… it just makes the conversation uncomfortable for me. I don’t like ordering at drive thrus, either. Oddly, if you call me, it’s no problem.
So, OP, I would not have called; but I would not have bothered on Craigslist, either. I would have just brought the bag to you.
I had not thought of the concept of the younger folks having an aversion to talking on the phone. Now that you mention it you are correct. Young folks will text and take 10-15 back and forth messages to do what 15 seconds on the phone would do the trick.
My money is on the poor fellow having a job wherein he must, with regularity, play phone tag with people, returning calls all day, and the like. I’ve spent the last couple of days doing so and my threshold for picking up the phone rather than use email/text is already shifting. Pity the poor saps who’s days revolve around this kind of crap.
I can think of a lot of really innocent reasons why this suited this person, several involving something in his personal life. We’re it me, I would not give it a second thought.
