I feel like I share an intuitive understanding of how different forms of communication are to be used with pretty much everyone I know over 50, but it gets dicey less than that.
I’m 60 now, and because of this thread I’ve started using DND when I go to bed.
I’m learning from here, from the folks who say that it’s not reasonable for others to know when I sleep and when I wake.
Thank you, dopers!
I’m 38. I send and receive texts 24/7. My business partner who’s 33 just texted me last night at 1015. I wake up to text messages several days per week and they’re always sent by people under 40.
Yeah, I would have guessed that if there’s a generational divide (and there likely is some difference) that it would go that younger folk are more likely to text 24/7 than older folk, not the other way around.
That is the exact opposite of what it seems like to me. Older people go to bed earlier and are more likely to not know how to use DND.
Yep, exactly so. By far most texts in the middle of the night are from folks under 40. The only person who told me to stop sending texts after a certain time was a 50 year old.
Hell, I have no idea what the email address is for most of my friends. Text is considered equivalent to a short email in my circles.
I strongly disagree.
Look, my wife works late. If she needs me at midnight, I need to be available.
Chatty, pointless, non- critical texts can wait until normal hours.
Perhaps the difference here is in what people consider “late.” I’m not usually asleep at 10:15.
I tell my friends it’s ok to text any time. If I am awake, I will see it. If I am asleep, it won’t wake me. But everyone needs to draw their own boundaries.
Case in point, a good friend just texted me about a church email being surprising. I didn’t get it, so she offered to forward it to me… and then realized she didn’t have my email address and had to ask for it.
I work for child welfare as a supervisor and I need to keep my phones (one for work and one personal) on for caseworkers out in the filed who might have an emergency. I typically tell them to use my personal phone as it becomes tedious attending to 2 phones all the time. Sometimes I just turn the work one off especially if it starts to receive multiple scam calls.
I also use my personal phone as an alarm.
For these reasons I rarely mute my phone except if I am at a medical appointment, in court, attending a meeting or engaged in some activity that requires a silent phone. I have had a cell phone since 1998 and learned how to vibrate and silence the darn thing immediately.
Occasionally one of my family members will send me a late night or way to early in the morning text which does wake me up. Thankfully this doesn’t happen too often.
I have difficulty with sleep and don’t appreciate being awakened except if it is necessary.
I am surprised by the number of people who use it like email.
This is a perfect example of people you know who may need to reach you during ‘commonly-understood’ late night hours.
That’s fine that you leave your phone on late at night while your wife is working, in case she needs to get in touch with you. If she does, then it’s fine for her to wake you up.
Because of this you, sir, represent a minority of the population.
But the vast majority of us do not have that need. We don’t have a loved one working graveyard shifts.
No, but add up all the people who have a loved one working the graveyard shift with all the people who have a child who might be sleeping elsewhere that night, all the people who have an elderly parent who lives alone, all the people whose jobs sometimes require them to be on-call for off-hours emergencies, and all the other examples given in this thread, and it doesn’t seem like such a small group anymore.
I’d think it’d go without saying that people who turn their phone/ringer off at night would have it on and available if a close family member had significant chance of needing late-night help or if they were waiting on an important message or their spouse was out at 2am or if they held the nuclear launch codes. But, for a regular evening, there’s little reason for these people to keep it active during sleeping hours.
[reply to Esprise_Me]
True, but I posit that it’s still a small group. The point is that each of us cannot expect others to know what hours of the day we sleep and would rather not be woken. It’s not reasonable.
But if you don’t mind being woken for a trivial text such as “Look at little Jamie’s first tooth!”, then go ahead and leave your phone on.
And those that don’t want to be woken can use DND.
It might be that the vast majority of people don’t have a loved one working late at night. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that the vast majority of us don’t have some need to keep their phone turned on late at night. There are other reasons to keep the phone turned on - possibly for work reasons such as @Ellecram who may have caseworkers calling with an emergency or people who will get the call if an alarm goes off at the store/office/warehouse outside of business hours. There are people who have a loved one in the hospital and need to be reachable at all hours and those with elderly parents who live alone. There are people with pregnant daughters/daughters-in-law/siblings etc who need to be reachable at all times because they are the person who will care for older sibling(s) when mom goes to the hospital. There are parents whose child is on an overnight school trip or a sleepover and so on … It’s entirely possible that most people will fall into one of these groups at one time or another - and you won’t necessarily know if the person you are planning to text at 2am falls into one of them.
I don’t have anyone that just has to send me a chatty text during sleep hours either. That is what email or Pms are for.
But she doesn’t work Graveyard. She works second shift.
Which means you won’t be alerted to something really important.
As I noted a few times, who uses email with their friends these days?
We have a new puppy and I’ve been taking her out to pee at 3 am every night. I use my phone for light. While Kizzy is peeing, I check my phone. It is a rare night that I don’t have at least one text/Messenger message/What’sApp message that was sent after I fell asleep. I do not answer these until later, while I eat breakfast, at 5:30.
Both iOS (Apple) and Android have a setting that will allow calls from your favorite contacts even when your phone is on DND. You can also choose to allow calls when any number calls twice within three minutes.
Do people not know about these settings, or are you really all expecting emergency calls from random numbers?