Re:The Death of the Telephone Call: 1876–2007
by seanp2k2 on Saturday September 24, 2016 @03:50PM
(#12572327)
Yeah, especially embarrassing if you work in tech and can't be arsed to turn off the email signature ads for your hip new mail client. I really don't like that many mobile email apps do this by default now. If your email app is significantly better than mobile outlook, I'll tell people about it myself.
Re:The Death of the Telephone Call: 1876–2007
by Spooky23 on Saturday September 24, 2016 @05:42PM
(#12572775)
I get the frustration, but there are many situations where a searchable corpus of your deliberation process is a liability. This is especially true if there there are multiple stakeholders with varying positions.
That said, there is typically no intelligence behind 95% of conference calls with more than 5 parties.
In a business context, I try to route substantive communications through email (or, if internal, through systems like Slack). There's nothing like a searchable corpus to minimize ambiguity, commemorate who said what, and when, and in response to which questions.
Likewise, there's a certain kind of project counterparty who inevitably tries to drive substantive communications through phone calls -- specializing in the dreaded dozen-person multi-time-zone conference call, featuring the ever-popular ten-minute parade of welcome tones, "who just joined?", and mystery attendees. These email-avoiders are the ones for whom calls are a tacit means of trying to project power, and ambiguity is a project management feature, not a bug, bound up with their own personal risk management strategy.
You probably know the type: when asked a detailed question by email that requires a specific and accountable response, they reply "Let's set up a call. -- Sent from my iPhone".
N.B. I like iPhones just fine, but please, turn off that sig.