{"id":24679,"date":"2019-09-28T12:57:52","date_gmt":"2019-09-28T19:57:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=24679"},"modified":"2019-09-28T17:23:15","modified_gmt":"2019-09-29T00:23:15","slug":"dont-answer-that-its-the-phone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=24679","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Answer, It’s the Phone"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Untitled\"<\/a>
Look at that dapper gent!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I’ll be up & at ’em early tomorrow, dressing for this year’s\u00a0Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride<\/a>, an international event to raise money for prostate cancer research. In addition to\u00a0the half-helmet and old-time goggles I normally sport, I’ll be wearing a blazer and tie. Donna’s sewing leather elbow patches on the blazer to give it that college prof look, and I have a briar pipe to put in the breast pocket. That should cover the dapper dress part of the DGR; the classic or vintage motorcycle I can’t do much about, but at least my\u00a0ride’s clean and hella sparkle.<\/p>\n

This year,\u00a0for the\u00a0first time since I started participating in DGRs, a motorcyclist friend\u00a0is joining me. I’ve been telling everyone how much fun these rides are, and someone finally listened. Dave and I are meeting at an agreed point at 8 AM tomorrow and riding to the start together. There will be, barring\u00a0a disaster, photos\u00a0… maybe even some video.<\/p>\n

I’m reading a book on how technology\u00a0has affected the way we speak and write: “Because Internet<\/a>”\u00a0by Gretchen McCullough. I\u00a0joined AOL in 1990,\u00a0wrote my first website\u00a0in raw HTML in 1995, and\u00a0started blogging in 2004; between that and my later\u00a0embrace of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram I feel\u00a0comfortably up-to-date on internet writing conventions. I quit double-spacing between sentences long ago,\u00a0and am on the record as a pioneer<\/a> in\u00a0the movement to lowercase “internet.” So a lot of what Gretchen McCullough has to say in her book is\u00a0old hat to me, but she says what she has to say in elegant and engaging prose, and I’m having fun reading it. She has me thinking about things I’ve been taking for granted, like how I answer the phone.<\/p>\n

You see, before she writes about how people answer calls on mobile devices, she backs up to the earliest days of landline telephones, when people were taught to say “hello” or “ahoy.” Ahoy (the salutation Alexander Graham Bell\u00a0tried to popularize)\u00a0didn’t catch on, but hello did, and people continue to answer by saying hello in the mobile phone age.<\/p>\n

I’m sure it wasn’t just my family, but we were raised by parents who thought answering the phone with an anonymous hello was rude. We were taught to answer by saying “Woodford residence,” similar to the way receptionists answer with a cheery “Doctor Smith’s office,” or “Acme Plumbing.” It became an ingrained habit, and to this day I answer our landline with “Woodford Residence.” I’m glad mom and dad raised us kids right. The way most people mumble “hello” when they answer your call, it sounds like “duh” or “huh.”\u00a0Might as well just grunt. But it’s better than “ahoy,” I guess.<\/p>\n

A benefit of answering the phone with a crisp business-style salutation is that it’s an effective filtering tool in this age of spam and robo-calls. “Woodford residence” confuses telemarketers and automated recordings\u00a0that key off “hello” and its variations.<\/p>\n

[phone rings]<\/p>\n

Woodford residence!<\/p>\n

[silence]<\/p>\n

[sound of me hanging up]<\/p>\n

You might think from all this\u00a0that technology hasn’t changed my telephone behavior, but you’d be wrong: I don’t say “Woodford residence” when I answer my iPhone. When someone calls\u00a0that number, they’re not calling\u00a0the house, they’re calling me. I answer by saying “This is Paul.” Although I haven’t finished Ms McCullough’s mobile phone chapter, I’ll be surprised if she writes about people who answer their cell phones the way I do. (Update: reading further, I see that she does.\u00a0After discussing the debate over the rudeness of “hello” and “hi,”\u00a0she\u00a0mentions that many answer cell phones with their own name. I appear to be not so special, after all<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Friends on Facebook and Twitter complain about getting spam calls and robocalls on their cell phones. I get them too, though not nearly as many as on\u00a0the landline (now that all but one or two\u00a0of our older relatives have passed on, all<\/em> our landline calls are spam calls, and the only reason we keep the damn thing is because Verizon gives us a better monthly rate with it than without it). Are mobile spam calls really a problem, though?\u00a0I don’t answer calls from numbers I don’t recognize. If the caller’s legit, they’ll leave voicemail and I can call back. And with the latest iOS update to the iPhone, you can set\u00a0it to not ring at all if the caller’s number isn’t on your contact list.<\/p>\n

Our old landline doesn’t show caller numbers, but it does record messages, so there’s really no reason to answer it either. But it sits on my office desk and if it rings while I’m at the desk I answer, just in case it’s one of those older relatives. But really, it’s mostly because I love saying “Woodford residence” and listening to the\u00a0bewildered silence that follows.<\/p>\n

I suppose, since I’m\u00a0babbling about tech, I should finish the saga\u00a0of our insane data-use rates. In June, July, and August\u00a0we went over our monthly data use limit. Our monthly allowance from Xfinity, our internet provider,\u00a0was a terabyte\u00a0of data.\u00a0When we used more we got charged for it. I visited the Xfinity office to see if they could help identify the problem. They gave me a new wi-fi modem,\u00a0with which I created a new home wi-fi network\u00a0with a new\u00a0password, ruling out piggybacking neighbors as a potential problem. On another visit, they turned me on to\u00a0a free\u00a0company app that\u00a0lets me track and turn off wi-fi connected devices in the house. We hit the\u00a0data limit again in the middle of September, so I made another trip to the Xfinity office.<\/p>\n

This time they\u00a0scheduled an installation technician to the house to check our connections and cabling. He came two days ago. Everything is fine. There is no “data leak,” any more than there’s a “secret server” with Hillary Clinton’s erased emails. The\u00a0leak, as I had come to suspect, is us. Or, rather, it’s probably Polly\u00a0… but I’m a pretty heavy user too, so maybe it’s the two of us. In addition to physically checking\u00a0things at our end, they gave me a very good deal on a plan that includes for-real unlimited data, backdating it to the beginning of September. I could probably get an even better deal if I agreed to switch our phone service from Verizon to Xfinity (which would also let\u00a0me ditch the landline with no penalty), but I’ll hold off on that for now. Or, rather, Donna\u00a0told me to hold off for now. Aunt J_____ might still\u00a0have the landline number on speed dial.<\/p>\n

It’s all about meeting everyone’s needs, isn’t it?<\/p>\n

Anyway,\u00a0said needs are now met and we can use all the data we want … but since one of the things I learned along the way is how Netflix’s streaming TV service uses data whether we’re watching or not, I’m still going to turn the Firestick doohickey off every night. Just to spite ’em.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… we were raised by parents who thought answering the phone with an anonymous hello was rude. We were taught to answer by saying “Woodford residence,” similar to the way receptionists answer with a cheery “Doctor Smith’s office,” or “Acme Plumbing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[412,18,5,2,30,827,6],"tags":[2448,2899,2420,2903,2902,2901,2900],"class_list":["post-24679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews","category-consumerism","category-motorcycling","category-personal","category-reviews","category-social-media","category-a-series-of-tubes","tag-fucktrump","tag-data-leak","tag-distinguished-gentlemans-ride","tag-impeachtrump","tag-linguistics","tag-robocalls","tag-spam-calls"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24679"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24701,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24679\/revisions\/24701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}