Society & Politics

Often overlooked phone etiquette

Often overlooked phone etiquette


I often wonder why I haven’t written a myTake until now, although I have been using this site since quite long. So, here goes!


It’s really surprising how most people don’t follow very basic phone etiquette. It’s often annoying, and sometimes downright rude. But then, I reside in a not-so-developed country, so some of the things I describe here may not be applicable for people living in developed countries. The following are the phone related behaviours which I have personally found quite annoying/insulting, and I suppose most others feel the same.


Disconnecting the call when the phone rings


This is certainly the kind of behaviour which I found to be extremely rude, and downright insulting. You call someone, and after a couple of rings, they disconnect the call. The ‘silence’ option on the phone is provided for a purpose. Using that just silences the ringing, while he person who called keeps hearing it ring until it disconnects itself. I know that people are often busy and are not in a position to answer calls all the time. But it doesn’t really need any extra efforts to use the ‘silence’ option instead of the ‘disconnect’ option. So people, whenever you know you are going to be busy, please consider putting your phone on silent/vibrating mode. If you would prefer to answer only important calls, then please have the courtesy to silence the ringing instead of blatantly disconnecting the call without answering it. And for those who have been at the receiving end of such non-courteous and rude behaviour, I suggest not calling this person too much until they get to realize that they lack basic phone etiquette.


Calling more than once if the call is not answered


Another highly annoying behaviour, although this is not as common as the first one. There are certain people who keep calling you repeatedly (that is, more than once) when you fail to answer their call, for whatever reason. If the call is not being answered, it obviously means the other person is busy at the moment. Try to avoid calling repeatedly, unless it is an emergency. If you need to convey something, either text the person about it or ask him/her to return your call whenever they get free. If you are using a phone which does not support texting (such as a fixed line or landline), then wait at least an hour before calling him/her again.


Not returning missed calls


This is usually more common than the first two behaviours, but not as annoying. So you call someone, they don’t answer you call, and they never call you back. You are led to believe that you are not ‘important enough’ for this person to return your call. And that’s fair enough. I understand that people can often be REALLY busy, but if your call is not returned within a reasonable time frame, your feeling of being ‘neglected’ is justified. And if you are at the other end (that is, you got a missed call), please make it a point to return the call whenever you can. If you are unable to do that, at least be courteous enough to text the other person about not being able to call.


Yelling into the phone


Now this does not concern the people actually involved in the call, as much as people around them. A lot of people, for some reason, significantly increase the loudness of their voice when the other person complains that the voice is not audible. Usually, this is caused due to a poor signal reception, extraneous noise or the phone’s mouthpiece not being close enough to your mouth. Yelling into the phone at the top of your lungs does not really improve the audibility for the person at the other end. Instead, what it does is, annoy the hell out of people around you. I mean…it is really not fair to MAKE people listen to whatever it is you are screaming on the phone, because they usually wouldn’t want to. If you face issues with the voice, just try moving to an area which is more open, or bringing your phone’s mouthpiece close to your mouth.


That’s all I could think of at the moment. This is my first attempt at wring a myTake, so I’m pretty sure I can’t expect the quality to be on par with what’s being written by most others here. Besides, English isn’t my native language, so some amount of ambiguity might have inadvertently creeped in somewhere. Pardon me for that. I welcome appreciation as well as criticism. Also, I suppose most people wouldn’t bother reading this because it is not related to dating and relationships, but that’s alright. That’s it from me for now! I hope to be able to write more myTakes henceforth.

Often overlooked phone etiquette
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