Given that humans communicate with each other every single day, we sure are incredibly fucking bad at it. It's one of the few things which makes me irrationally angry, so I might as well put my anger into this wall of text.

The latest incident on my end happened yesterday. I received a text message saying:

I'm not exaggerating: Never in my life was a call preceding with just "it's important" actually important enough for me to drop all of my shit and call them. In every single fucking case, a text message with 2-5 sentences would have been sufficient.

This has happened (several times) with family, friends and strangers. And it's triggering the fuck out of me. If it's actually important - why the fuck don't you give me a quick rundown? Every single fucking time I call and the gist of the conversation is handled within 20 seconds.

I'm tired of it. I won't be answering any of these anymore as a matter of principle (and spite [0]).

What kind of logic is this? We have the technology to send text messages, which is the sole reason why someone was able to notify me in the first place. It's an asynchronous medium. Do you know how awesome that is? Someone can send message without the other party actively expecting to receive it. For important shit, that's fantastic: I'll give you all of the important information, maybe with additional requests (like fucking "can we discuss this more in detail?" or something), and as soon as I can I am able to read this and decide for myself on what to do next. Even better, I am able to respond with another text message, maybe even resolving the whole issue.

But no. What people tend to do is to send me a text message saying "It's important". The issue at hand is (so far 100% of the time) in some form of quantum superposition, in which it requires immediate attention, but it is not important enough to spend one minute writing a few sentences so I can get the information as soon as possible. It gets even more ironic: After not reaching me immediately, there tends to be a solid 50% chance of them spamming the message over several other channels: Other messangers, Email, or even telling other people to message me as well.

Do you realize how much effort that is? How a fucking fraction of that effort could have been spent on just fucking texting me the fucking issue? How much faster this whole thing could have been resolved? No, that is apparently impossible. Instead of spending a minute, one rather waits for the next opportunity of a synced schedule so they can describe the problem over the phone. Probably because of some "convenience", or because "it's easier" or "faster" - which is just wrong.

But don't get me wrong: I don't want to dodge phone calls at all costs. Quite the opposite: Most (if not all) important conversations I had were over the phone. Some of which even required immediate attention. The important calls I had so far

• were announced beforehand. "I might give you a call this evening about x due to y". "I might need to talk about x with you after y", ...
• sent me a text message containing the reason why it's important.

And I'm not talking a life or death situation. Giving me an urgent call can be for the most miniscule reason:

• "Hey I feel lonely and just need someone to talk to"
• "I had a shit day and need to vent to someone, are you free?"
• "I had some incident with x and y and need your opinion on the matter"
• ...

and you bet your ass I'll try to reach them as soon as I can [1]. All I want is to not be stressed out over stupid shit that

• can be resolved within two sentences
• do not require immediate attention
• are not within my capabilities at fucking all

Oh that's not all of it, don't you worry. There is so much more I can rant about:

The Dialogue Tree

Oh how I fucking hate the dialogue tree. I'm not exaggerating: I have ended friendships with people who did this shit consistently. Some of my friends and family are still doing this to some extent, and it annoys me greatly. It's best explained by the following image:

It's a gigantic waste of both of our time. Just fucking talk about the thing you actually want to talk about. You are not "rude" if you don't start the convo with a greeting. If you still feel bad, just put all of your shit in one message. For the love of god, don't make me walk all of the fucking tree myself, sending a single message after each fucking element and expecting me to give you an answer. Posting a text message only consisting of "hey" can basically be completely ignored.

That is not to say that I we can't talk about the things that happened during the day, your feelings or just smalltalk in general. If that is the point of the conversation, that is perfectly fine. I just hate it when people try to "pad" their conversations with this when they don't actually care about it.

"Can I ask you a question?"

Asking to ask is a common phenomenon, which is also incredibly infuriating to me. So common in fact that several people have dedicated websites for this. Basically a short form of the dialogue tree, just even more pointless.

"Do you have a minute/second" / "Can I give you a quick call?"

This is never a short / quick thing. This shit always takes up way too much time. And fucking 75% of the time my responds ends up being either

• "I don't know" or
• "Your idea sounds ok"
• "I don't know, I have to think about it"

Again, the leitmotif of this rant, just send me a fucking text message:

• If it was a short thing, then asking for a call is probably about as much effort as asking me the thing directly.
• You lazy fuck don't want to spend 5 minutes describing the problem, which has a decent chance of resolving the problem in the process, so why the fuck should I spend my time trying to help?
• There is no need to drag me into a call for a thing I might not know jack shit about. Waiting for me to respond to this is a gigantic waste of our time.
• If the problem is too complicated I probably can't come up with a solution on the spot.

Asking Computer Related Questions

Last one, because I can probably write about this shit for weeks. Especially with computer related problems, people are so fucking incredibly bad at asking things. There's an even longer wall of text on how to ask questions, but here is the short form I mostly care about:

• Try to look up your problem on your own. There's a pretty high chance you are not the first person on the planet to have this problem, so there might be solutions to this.
• Post the whole problem, including error messages and what not. "It doesn't work" is utterly pointless.
• Say what you expected to happen.
• State the approaches you tried (hint: When working with computers, there is basically no penatly of just trying shit 99% of the time. In these situations: If you haven't tried anything, you can fuck right off)