Not so much a rant as a Did you seriously just call me to ask me that right now?
My wife and I went on a cruise several summers ago. Had a great time.
One of their reps just called me to ask if I were interested in booking another sometime soon.
I would have some choice words for the caller, like telling them that prank calls like that were in very bad taste in the current times, perhaps also telling them that they should find something legal and productive to do with their spare time, and then hang up.
I’m not much of a small-talk conversationalist, but I actually have the opposite situation with a couple of good friends. Even if one of us calls the other with what is supposed to be just one simple question or bit of news, I can be on the phone with them for hours due to some combination of the friend doing the talking and/or inspiring me to talk about something myself. I guess that sort of rapport is why they’ve been my best friends for so many years. But with other people, yeah, it can be like you describe.
We have a digital phone and internet with the same company. All of a sudden, the phone doesn’t work and the internet is choppy, at best. I have called customer service three times now and even spent half an hour with a tech yesterday afternoon, where he said, “Hm, your internet shouldn’t be running that slow” and “I’ll have a repair person contact you for an appointment.” Nobody has given me the courtesy of a call back. The land line sounds fine on our end, and the phone rings, but nobody can understand us when we talk on the land line.
So your concern is whether you’re done or not? What if they were done ten minutes ago?
See, I’m the one on the other end of the phone. I often DON’T call my mom, because if I do, it’ll be a long, amorphous call.
With mom, it can’t be an efficient call. I can phone a friend: “Hey, it’s Diggory, did you talk to your boss?” “Yep, got a decent review, and he apologized for undercutting me during that meeting!” “Cool!” Add a minute of how are the kids and we’re done.
But my mom’s favorite phone phrase is… “Well, let’s seeee, what ellllse can I tell you?”, as she mentally goes through a list of everyone in her church and all her relatives and friends to see who had a good book/puzzle/disease/visitor.
I just don’t have the time or the attention span for that.
…
So, Thelma, maybe people love to talk to you. For a few minutes.
Do make a list, of things you MUST cover, and get to those soon (what feels like “early in the conversation” for you). Then be sensitive to what your friends want to talk about, and when they’re getting antsy to get back to their tasks.
I’ve been binge-re-watching “The O.C.” as my current brain candy escapism. Watched it each week back when it was airing on FOX.
MEIN GOTT IN HIMMEL the theme song is the worst, most horribly irritating whiny howl in the world. I hated it then, and I hate it now. It gets stuck in my head, too, and no amount of any radio can dislodge it from my brain.
We play music 10 straight hours at work. It’s still fucking stuck in my head. Plus it’s HBO so they don’t have that nifty “Skip Intro” feature that Netflix has (may the gods smile blessings upon whoever invented that) and I just wanna veg out and watch the next episode without re-cementing it into my poor brain.
Squirrels. Raccoons.
Something chewed a wire. Or a connection is failing.
Worse than the theme song for season 1 of the podcast Someone Knows Something? They picked a good song in terms of the lyrics, but the ‘singer’…yikes. I still can’t figure out the purpose of punctuating one’s song with “eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh.”
At one point, my electric co-op tried out an outage alert program in which they would notify members by email of estimated repair times, and then follow that up with an explanation of what had happened. On many occasions, the cause was listed simply as “squirrel.”
It’s Saturday here and the day after tomorrow, schools in Beijing, including the one where I teach, will have the staff return to campus, followed by the students trickling in over the end of next week and that weekend so in-class on-campus instruction can begin on 1 September 2020. STUPID! STUPID! STUPID!
Sorry, I’ve got to ruin! I don’t have the time or attention span to read – 
The only way to get an earworm out is to chase it out with a different one. In that spirit, I present Snake Farm.
D&R
At least your internet company acknowledges that there’s a problem.
Our internet sucks donkey balls and when my husband called (again) to complain the tech dude told him that everything was “perfectly fine”. After the fifteenth time of being told that getting .02 mbs of speed was “perfectly fine” I thought my very mild mannered husband was going to reach through the phone and choke the guy.
“Perfectly fine” is now code for “sucks donkey balls” in our household.
And yes, our internet is still “perfectly fine”.
In the early days of broadband, our ISP declared a lot of situations like that to be “perfectly fine”. The doofuses (or possibly, doofi) pretending to be “tech support” were basically taught how to ping your modem, and if the ping came back at least some of the time, then everything was “perfectly fine”. One of the most notoriously frustrating things to call those idiots about was substandard speeds. Part of the problem, besides the inferior cable modem technology of the time, was inadequate local infrastructure that often got saturated with traffic, which they were gradually upgrading but were loathe to publicly admit that there was a problem. So the scripts that their useless “tech support” were given basically focused on denying the problem.
Today, though, because of competition, better regulatory oversight, and greatly improved technology and infrastructure, speeds are pretty much as advertised and support is much more responsive. Though I would still rank my cable company, like many other cable broadband providers, pretty much at the bottom of the list in terms of customer service.
K. I’m back. You didn’t need to clobber me quite so hard. I’m not your mother (which you know), and I’m not long-winded.
My point was entirely about the awkwardness of “dead air” on the phone (like on the radio), i.e., the pauses during a conversation, which are normal and not a problem during an in-person visit but uncomfortable on the phone. Currently, I’m not doing any visiting in person, but leisurely conversation on the phone is difficult because of the awkwardness of dead air. That’s it.
Sorry for clobberin’. I thought about adding an addendum where I said “But I’m clearly projecting here”.
I’m just having a hard time dealing with “I really should call my mom” vs "I don’t have the attention span to deal with her long monologues…
…
and …
… pauses"
…
It doesn’t help that she’s a Tightie-Rightie who knows I’m not, so she’ll start a topic, then stop, realizing she wouldn’t have a leg to stand on if I asked he why she thinks that (I’m so tempted to interrupt her with “Cite?”).
Big issue: My mom thinks we’re giving her a ride to a family wedding in a month. She’s 90+ with horrible lungs and a heart condition, and is supposed to have NO contact with anyone. But she’s planning to ride six hours each way in a car with us, a couple who work in disease-ridden professions. We’ll get tested, but we can’t quarantine for weeks before the trip (not when you work in a hospital… grr).
So I may be dealing with the guilt that we’ve given her Covid. Which would probably be her last disease… Mom’s reaction? She just said “I’m going to this wedding even if it kills me!”
I really wish I could say “Not with me you’re not. Here’s $500 for an Uber.”
Those are tough issues. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.
Thanks, it means a lot to have a community to lean on. This is eating me up.
The bride says they might have to scale back the wedding. I wish she’d scale it back to “people not at risk”.
(But if she put an age limit, it’d probably be 65, which I’d just miss…)
Errhmm … besides the car ride, wouldn’t the wedding crowded with people be a colossal risk?
Okay, she’s determined to attend said wedding if it kills her. I guess, we all gotta go sometime from something - sounds like she might Uber it there herself if she had to. (And had a young’un to explain Uber and set it up for her … ?)
If this is literally the hill she’s willing to die on, then O.P. can at least have the slim consolation that it’s not likely his own breath that kills his mother, but any number of other guests, bridesmaids, groomsmen, catering crew, church crew etc.
… and is this really where we are? Seriously, I would never have believed this shit a year ago. Look at the calculations people are(n’t) making re: their own ability to inadvertently kill someone they love.
You’re cute. 
That was like a mosquito fart in a tornado.
I’m familiar with that tactic, though. I even allowed “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” into my head in a final attempt at retaliation. It was a brave but futile battle.
*Caaaaaliforrrrrnnniiiiaaa … *
