Don't Leave Me Hangin' on the Telephone
by Kris Weberg on August 18, 2006
"Goodbye" is, increasingly, the midpoint of every conversation I have online or on wireless. Every phone call with a friend or relative seems to turn into one of Eliot's winding streets, though usually neither tedious nor insidious.
I thought this might help, but it's painfully generic advice:
There are several ways that you can end a long phone call without making up a story or sounding rude:
Leave the conversation open.
Promise to finish your discussion at another time.
End on an "up" note.
Tell the person how much you've enjoyed speaking with him/her.
As long as you are honest and polite with the other person, you shouldn't have any problems getting off the phone and onto something else.
And then I felt oddly guilty that I was looking up sneaky ways of getting out of talking to people. And at any rate, there's a kind of easy and langorous pleasure in winding away the evening that way, without the need to make up some slight pretext of further sociality -- coffee, bar, movie, etc. -- to justify talking. Just call, and go on as long as you care to.
It's so much trickier online, though, where you don't even have the vocal cues and the sort of timing to figure out how and when to go off. And in chats, there's always what I call "conversation overlap," in which one respondent or other manages to reply in between two halves of an incomplete statement. I've certainly had one or two friends with whom online chatting became an exercise in mutual annoyance.
Technology has long since outstripped politesse, though, and I guess I must resign myself to that. Now, if only I could figure out how to end this blog post without
Two Replies to Don't Leave Me Hangin' on the Telephone
Amy Austin | August 24, 2006
Heheh...
Berserk Wig
Legend has it that Kris Weberg's head is filled with delicious candy, which is why he avoids blindfolded children carrying sticks. Fortunately for you, he's decided to empty the leftovers here at his blog for your amusement and bemusement. Read more »
Imaginary Exploits of a Hairpiece Gone Mad
I stop blogging for a week to read up on political theology, and the world goes awry: planets vanish from the heavens, fantasy football gains a stereotypically "feminine" counterpart, and America's children become catastrophically dumber. And the worst of it is, I haven't really got much to post about in my life, unless someone here is up for a discussion of Walter Benjamin's metaphor of the automaton and the dwarf, which is nowhere near as funny as the dirty joke you probably just made up while reading that phrase. (See, there's this chess-playing automaton, and it represents historical materialism, but the machine is animated by a hidden dwarf who represents theology....oh, Go »Like the first census in China
Quite possibly the best non-TC blog post ever. The comments are the funniest part. It does raise an interesting, if commonly-known point about the Internet (or, as Senator Ted Stevens calls it, "a bunch of tubes"): It's like your permanent record from grade school, only real....and Go »Collaborative Theatre with Irrational Actors
At a certain point, I guess everyone realizes that it's no use arguing with someone who's coming from virtually a different planet in terms of assumptions and opinions. And at a certain other point, some people realize that they cannot stop despite the uselessness of going on. While that sort of argument only very rarely happens to me here at TC, it certainly happens to me elsewhere, where I use various Zaba-proof psuedonyms to conduct my arguments about subjects ranging from the pointless to the inane. Go »Natural Deselection
Every so often, something happens to you that makes you realize nature or God or whatever else you attribute your existence to apparently goes to work drunk sometimes. And sometimes that realization makes you post long, boring blog entries that people only read in hopes of getting clues for a prize-free post-title game. Clues that aren't actually there. Go »Silk appears in Rome
Hi, all! This will be the second blog I've authored and the fourth blog with which I've been involved as an author, and I still haven't really worked out just what to say in these introductory posts. As most of you know, though, I'm wordy enough once I get rolling that content shouldn't be a problem. Go »
Jackie Mason | August 20, 2006
[hidden by author request]