• I hate my phone call making device because it doesn’t work
• I hate my phone call making device because it works

I’m a victim of both. Why #1? Because my Treo 700P is driving me up the wall. It locks up constantly, and many days, I find myself rebooting it 7, 8, 9 times. I’m about to make demands that involve getting a new Treo, so that takes care (we hope) of that.

Why#2? Partly because I’ve never enjoyed phone conversations. Oh, I have my chatty moments, but most of the time, the phone is an intrusion that can’t be controlled except in two rather unsubtle ways – ignoring calls or turning the phone off. (My unreliable Treo offers a third way, completely out of my control.)

Is it good for messages? Voicemail is at the chimp level of message transmission. It can’t be scanned or organized. The new iPhone will display a list of voicemail messages and that will be a giant leap for humankind. In my last job, I was able to configure the system to email me my voicemail messages – an email with a tiny wav file. That was great because I could get around the archaic commands of voicemail that I could never remember. At my new job, we’re back to the world of *6, etc.

With the exception of perhaps three uses, the phone – for me – is an outdated, unhelpful tool. It’s good for meetings, and this was something I didn’t discover until about 3 years ago when I started participating in lots of conference calls. I don’t know what it is about a conference call – maybe it’s the voice pumped directly into my ears – but I often concentrate better during a call, and remember more afterward, than during a face-to-face meeting. There are also those times when email and IM simply can’t cut it – the wider bandwidth of a phone call saves about a dozen back-and-forth emails. Phone calls are good for interview situations – the high volume Q&A is more efficient over phone.

I’m a big fan of IM and I’ve used it for 10 years, at times intermittently, at times constantly. I think if there’s one drawback to it, it’s that it’s harder to control the intrusion. But when I’m in thinking or writing mode, I’ve learned to set the “away” to hold off the intrusion. To that end, the “leave a message” function in both GTalk and AIM is a nice thing.

Yes, so what have we learned? I’m a control freak. I do like to have a measure of control over the interruptions to my workflow. But I’m not so crazy as to assume I can hermetically seal myself off. What I have been reasonably successful at doing is getting people to email me rather than call. And I try to reward the email sender by being as prompt with my reply as I can be.