Author: Matthew Baya

Don’t call me (maybe)

oldphoneI’m not a big fan of phone calls.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind hearing from friends & family, or if you have something pressing that demands my attention or requires an immediate response, then by all means, call me!

But in my job, my attention needs to be prioritized, and a phone call pulls me off what ever I’m doing. It’s the equivalent of someone saying ‘Drop whatever you are doing and listen to me’. Yes I know I could just not answer, but (most of the time) I’m not that rude.

E-mail works much better for me because I can see it when I’m free and I can prioritize if it needs an immediate response or not.

Phone calls don’t give me that choice. It’s an ‘interupt’, instead of a queued task. (geek speak, sorry)

Examples of annoying phone calls;

  • I’ve run into sales people who just call to ‘check in’. This happens several times a week “Hi Matthew this is Deb from <Insert name of generic unheard of computer products sales vendor>, I sent you e-mail about <insert product du-jour> a few days ago and just wanted to make sure you got it and see if you had any questions.
  • Other people will send me an e-mail in response to a question and in it they basically say ‘Call me’.
  • Long lists that I need to write down. If only you had e-mailed the list and saved us both time.

I realize a lot more information can be conveyed quickly verbally than via e-mail. I don’t hate the phone calls per se, I just don’t like people who use it for ‘quick phone calls’. In my book, if you can e-mail me the info in close to the same amount of time it took to call, and it’s not urgent, then please please e-mail me.

This is also why I don’t often call other people. Usually if I have a question or want to share something, I’ll e-mail it. It seems rather arrogant for me to assume that my question or information is soooooo important that I need you to hear me right away. I save my phone calls for ‘Priority One Message from Starfleet’ type moments. So if I respond to your voicemail via e-mail, this is why, it’s not that I don’t want to talk to you, it’s that my response didn’t warrant your immediate attention. When/if I need it, I’ll call, I promise.

This feeling about time and immediate attenion extends to meetings and committees as well.

Seriously, you’re going to read a document out loud in a committee instead of e-mailing us that text in advance?

Or seriously, you have suggestions/input on a motion that was e-mailed in advance 30 days but you wait until we’re at the table getting ready to vote to share this because you don’t like e-mail?

I don’t mind discussion, it’s just moments where an e-mail would have saved 5 minutes of time x 20 people on a committee.. you just wasted 100 minutess of our collective time because you couldn’t spend 2 minutes to fire off an e-mail before we met. Nice. (I’ve noticed this action often comes from lawyers, and I’m guessing this is a ‘never put anything in writing cause people can use it against you’ type logic they must teach in law schools. I’m sure that applies in business negotiations and divorce settlements, but for a volunteer committee? Show some respect to your colleagues and e-mail.)

Anyways, just thought I’d share this minor glimpse in my warped persona. Agree or disagree, please e-mail me your response 🙂

 

 

Ugh. My son wants to play Magic: The Gathering

Burning MoneyOut of the blue Owen, our 9 year old in 4th grade, mentions to me today, ‘My friend J**** plays Magic: The Gathering and I want to spend all my back-due allowance and savings on this box of assorted cards I found on ebay’.

Sigh. <shakes fist and curses the fates> Seriously? I’ve never even mentioned this game to him. He’s bought some Pokemon cards over the years but never showed interest in actually playing the game (possibly cause I never showed interest either). But now thanks to school and friends, my apathy and dislike of this type of game can no longer protect him.

(I also had no idea he knew how to find stuff on ebay, but that’s is a whole other issue)

To put this into context for those of you who don’t know this, this is a game I played, and frankly spent way too much money on, in the early 90’s while I was working at Antioch College and hanging out with those pesky students that played cool games. This was pretty much the primary game many of us played for a few years there. After my friends all graduated and left town it was a sad realization that I had all these cards, that I had spent more than I care to admit on, and no one to play games with. So shortly before we moved to Maine I sold all the cards that had any value and threw the rest in boxes.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game that involves strategy and creativity. With Owen’s interest in math and fantasy worlds it’s probably a good match on some levels, but it also requires a bunch of expensive cards or at least there’s built in ‘Oh if I just spent a little more I’ll get some better cards and I’ll have more fun’ pressures inherent in the game.

Oh and it never ends, you can’t just ‘buy them all’ and be done, they keep releasing new sets of cards every few months and thus you need to keep spending more more more to stay current. Oh and there’s an extensive set of rules you need to know to play the game, so you cant just casually play it a little, you need burn lots of time on learning it all to really be good at it.

This is why I haven’t ever played this game with him and why I’m groaning to see him not only getting interested but, worst of all, seeing him starting to burn what little money he has on it.

So when I get home from work he tells me he wants these cards and even goes so far to hand me a wad of cash and says ‘This plus the back allowance you owe me covers the cost of what I want to get’

No amount of explaining that A) These are probably from older sets thus harder to use now, B) This is a waste of money IMHO and C) You don’t even know how to play the game! D) These are just lame common & uncommon cards .. and any other arguments I could think of… could sway his ‘But you said I can spend my money on what I want!’ arguments. It’s true, we said that. Sigh.

The chorus from an old Kenny Rogers song echoes in my head now as I enter my paypal password to buy this box of cards;

‘Promise me son not to do the things I’ve done, walk away from trouble if you can‘

Though, to be fair, I guess old habits die hard, I have to admit I haven’t volunteered to give my remaining old cards I haven’t touched in 15 years to him yet.

Maybe I can sell them on ebay? 🙂

OR .. it might be kind of fun to play again.

Oh. No. Help! I think I need an intervention!