Wow, I have never heard of 9 p.m. as a rule of thumb. Are you guys a bunch of farmers? I’ve always used 10 p.m. for strangers, but since I don’t know anyone who would get upset about receiving a phone call at midnight, that’s a pretty loose rule. If the matter was at all urgent, I would call later. As a teenager, my friends and I pretty much all had our own lines, with no phone curfews imposed. I would probably have forgotten when I called the one friend with a strict mother.
From my point of view, you’re way overreacting. That rule is one you impose in your house, not something universally accepted. You explain it to her politely, and if it keeps happening, then you can get annoyed.
Chula, I must be a farmer. I can’t really think of anyone I know who would not be disturbed if I called after 10:00pm. By disturbed I mean startled, wakened, angry, bothered and otherwise inconvenienced.
All of your friends must keep later hours than the people I know.
Public school teachers, whose bosses expect us to get up and come in twenty minutes before God gets up in the morning, on the off chance that our classes will spontaneously decide to wander in for instruction at seven A.M.
Therefore, I like to be in bed somewhere after nine, and hopefully out cold by ten, ten-thirty, or so. This allows me to get up way too early, have something resembling breakfast and a cup of coffee, bathe and shave, and dress myself in the stylish and professional manner that they don’t quite pay me enough to maintain, and be reasonably fresh for work.
Therefore, anyone calling MY house after nine had damn well better have a really good reason for doing so. And God help you if you hang up on me after I’ve figured out who you are.
The occasional mistake or thoughtless action is understandable, sure. We all make mistakes. But failing to go “oops, sorry,” at least, is, in my eyes, a bit of a faux pas… and if you cop an attitude with me about it (the way a friend of my daughter’s did, once)… well… anyone dumb enough to wave a red flag at the bull deserves the horns, don’cha think?
It’s the morning calls the freak me out. And, invariably, wake me up, since I don’t have classes until at least 10:40. My family is 3000 miles away, my SO 500. None of them would call me in the middle of the day unless there was an emergency, so I always have that moment of worry when the phone rings at 9 am.
Invariably, it’s some creditor looking for the woman who used to have my number.
That I concede. I understand that calling people after midnight doesn’t seem reasonable to a lot of people, but I don’t accept that 11 p.m. is universally seen as shockingly unreasonable.
Master Wang-Ka, this girl did apologize. She either (a) didn’t know it was too late because she can call other people at that time, or (b) didn’t realize what time it was. Either way, she deserves a break, especially considering she’s just a kid. At least ivylass should have explained the rules in her house; otherwise the kid might end up calling at 10 p.m. next time, thinking that’s the cut-off time.
My parents pretty much say, after 10 our friends cannot call unless it is important. If they do call, they don’t yell at us but we damn well better pick it up on the first ring, and god forbid make them get it. During the summer I normaly have late night conversations with a friend of mine (10-1), but I call him on his cell-phone, so it all works out. I think that ivylass should have asked her why she was calling, and if it wasn’t extremly important, THEN she could have bitched to the girl. Even I would have gotton pissed off to the max if one of my friends called after 11 or before 8 just to talk about some guy or something. Still my friends have strict parents. Anyway, the girl was out of line, you don’t call at 11 to talk about your neopet.
Hm. Yeah, I did kind of give the impression I didn’t read the OP too closely, didn’t I?
I wasn’t exactly commenting on the OP so much as I was growling about one of my pet peeves. Mumbling an apology and hanging up … well, it’s a mistake, but she apologized for it. It isn’t that big a deal.
Simply hanging up, on the other hand, is a sure way to get under my skin.
It sounds like I’m 3/4 of the way to keeping teacher’s hours, which is good, since I’m going to be one.
I need sleep. Lots of it. My ideal sleep schedule is about eight hours. I am normally asleep by about 11:30, earlier if I have to get up early. Late in the evening I simply don’t want to talk to people. It really is nothing personal, I just don’t feel like being sociable.
I’ve always been like this, so I hope to Og it’s not an age thing. Even as a kid I liked to sleep. It still amazes my mom.
I’m a nght owl, but any teenager calling my kids after 9-10 PM better have some life of death situation on the burner, and I don’t mean teen boredom or some “I’m lonely” depressive angstification. Your daddy has to be the man on point for enough crises in his workaday life, to expect him to have to keep dealing with it once he’s safe in his hobbit hole is a little much, whether your friend is depressed or not. People have got to have some peace.
I had the 10 o’clock cut off when I was in high school. Man, I used to get on that phone at about 5 and talk steady right up until 10 o’clock. Can’t imagine doing that now, I’m not much of a phone person, really.
My parents were known for their strictness. I didn’t have a single friend who I didn’t threaten with their lives, should they dare to call my house after 10. Because Lord knows, I’d be the one hearing about it for days from my disgruntled parents. They adopted the mentality that if I got into enough trouble for it, I’d be damn sure to not have my friends do it again. I’m loathe to say that it worked, but it really kinda did.
To all of you getting your panties in a bunch about Ivylass*'s sheer nerve at being stern with an 11 year-old, all I can say is: get over yourselves. It’s an 11 year old girl calling up in a perky voice. Didn’t sound as if she was standing out on the ledge. I’m also not too sure about asking every late caller if it’s an emergency. To many pre and teenage girls, anything is a freaking emergency.
I’d say any real emergency would be one that would need to be handled by their parents. Well, maybe not so much past 16 or so, but an 11 year old? Comon’. What kind of emergency does an 11 year old have?
we don’t get phone calls (except recorded telemarketers) so we would be happy if anyone called us.
We go to bed about 11:30 anyway.
On school nights, too.
I fully understand and endorse the idea of limiting phone calls after a certain time of night, if the phone happens to be one shared by the entire family, so the ringing can be heard in every room and wakes up every living soul in the house. However, if your kid has their own phone, or a cell phone, I don’t understand why it’s a problem. If they want to stay up until all hours talking and be exhausted and miserable at school the next day, hell, let 'em.
And I was once guilty of accidentally calling a friend whose parents had the NO CALLS AFTER NINE rule, at 9:10 PM. I forgot to check the clock, and the first thing I hear when dad picks up the phone is “This better fucking be good!” Um, it’s not like I’m calling at three in the morning dude, it’s ten minutes after your goddamn holy cutoff time. Crotchety old man, much? :rolleyes:
Even if it means they end up failing their classes?
A lot of kids (at least in the preteen/young teen age range) don’t have the judgment yet to make responsible use of such freedom, and left to their own devices they’ll too much time chatting on the phone/watching TV or DVDs/surfing the 'net to do well in school. Until they mature a bit more and show they are beginning to figure out how much of that “fun stuff” they can do and still function well in school, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for their parents to set limits for them.
I got this friend’s parents to finally take him to a psychiatrist and get him appropriate treatment a little while after this happened. It was hard to confront them, but those couple of times that he went fully catatonic while I was around were starting to freak me out.
After this happened, Qadgop and I agreed that any late-night calls would be put through, and they would depend on my judgement to decide when to chew my friends out for making them. As this was the only late-night call that I received in the 18 years that I lived at home, it ended up being kind of a moot point anyway.
Yeah, my dad has a habit of calling me up in the middle of the night when he’s drunk and wants someone to talk to. I’d told him numerous times to not do this, and the last time he did it, I answered with “What? It’s 2 AM!” He apologized and told me that they’d been in a car accidnet (Dad, brother and sister) and that my sister was very seriously injured. Boy, I felt like an ass.
My mom always had a rule of not allowing people to call after 9. I got in trouble when people would ignore that rule. Now that I run my own house, I get irritated if people call after 11 or so. I had a friend who’d routinely call at midnight, even after we told her numerous times that we were asleep at that time because my husband had to be up at 5 am to go to work. I generally don’t call people after 9 or 10, unless I know they are night owls.
And I didn’t just hang up on him, I hung up on him and went and told elfbabe he’d called. Then she called him back. If I’d been having neurons functioning better that night, and had remembered when he called that this was the guy who once spent a weekend curled up in the fetal position on my couch, I’ve have put him through.
Kid had serious major endogenous depression, intervention occurred thanks to elfbabe, kid got help, got well. Not “angsty”.
… and was quietly mad at you for about a week afterward. Then I got over it, though, and the whole thing just made me very eager to have a cell phone for this type of thing.
