Chit Chat

One of the few skills that I never really learned during my years at AV-Base is phone manners. Not to say that I'm not polite, it's just that friendly chit-chat on the phone has never been my forte. It seems that a lot of people spend at least a little time discussing the weather, or how tough work was in the past week, or some major event in their families' lives.

Me, I'm much more to the point. I regularly need to call our clients to ask them design questions or to answer a particularly difficult question about our software. I usually open with an introduction, ask if they have five minutes to talk and boom, I'm into the main subject. Once it's over, I offer my thanks and that's the end of the call. It's efficient but it's all business, no fun.

I find that I act that way during my personal phone calls as well. My main motivation is that I don't want to suck up too much time from someone. (That's right, I don't want to suck.) I have no idea what the other person was doing when I called them or when they called me. Perhaps they have someone standing there waiting for them, so who am I to take up ten minutes?

Of course, most people probably would like to chat for a while. Even if I allowed for this, I'm still not good at it. I don't know what to do with meaningless chit chat. I don't really care to discuss the weather. I don't know why anyone would care basketball was cancelled at the church yesterday because no-one showed up.

Granted, I have quite often taken the lead in opening up conversations with new people. Throw me into a group with one new person and I can easily strike up a funny "get to know you" conversation for fifteen minutes. I would say that this is a learned behaviour, though, so that the group doesn't sit there silently for a long time. I haven't really learned how to do this effectively with people I know casually.

However, once in a while I do have a friend like Richard or Joel Terry that calls for the sole purpose of catching up on things. These conversations easily stretch towards one hour and they're a pleasure for me. The difference, though, is that the intention is clear and these are my close friends. I still find it difficult to chat with an acquaintance for five minutes or more on the phone.

Funny enough, I can sit down and type up a blog post for more than a half hour. It's just these real-life conversations that are tricky. Heh.