The ephemeral nature of a voice call is not only an advantage for questionable activities.

You can defuse a potential conflict by voice call because the medium allows airing of issues in a more candid fashion, and allows more rapid convergence onto common ground compared to text based communication.

I think that bad news is best communicated along channels that allow some kind of non-verbal perception (on a phone call largely by judging the nature and length of the silences). Face to face is best, but synchronous voice communication is a second best.

Not sure how common this is outside of the valley, but Google Hangouts and other video conferencing solutions work pretty well too. Maybe not so much Hangouts because the video quality is terrible, but it + chromebox for meetings is so much cheaper than previous solutions which required 8u of rack space for a video processor and server that it's totally worth it.

That can be a good thing! As noxious as a conference call is, a drawn out mailing list battle is far worse.

Those situations are so common at Microsoft that they put a button in Outlook specifically to mute those threads.

> Fortunately I'm not involved in anything shady that would make records of that kind a liability.

Be careful with "nothing to hide" arguments. All else aside, sometimes it's nice to voice a frustrated opinion about a person without creating a permanent record.

Note that more and more phone systems record every call.