“I Can’t Talk Now”?

I’ve wanted to write this for years but I’ve kept putting it off because I didn’t want to be off-putting. But I need to get it out of my system, not that it won’t linger to some degree; at least I won’t think about writing it…though I suppose I’ll think about the fact that I have written it.

Why do people answer the phone only to say, “I can’t talk now”? If they can’t talk then why answer the phone? Sometimes they’ll add, “Can I call you back?” Do they expect to hear in response, “No, as a matter of fact you can’t call me back”? I can understand the occasional instance when we might want to let the caller know that the call is important but that we’re in the midst of something that we need to finish after which we’ll call back; but that should be the exception. This reactionary answering is off-putting, “I can’t talk right now.”

Okay, thanks for telling me that you can’t talk right now but the fact is that you are talking to me right now; if you can’t talk right now then please let the call go to voice mail or let me decide to hang up and not leave a message knowing that you have caller-ID and that you’ll call me back when you can talk. Add to the foregoing that often when people answer and say, “I can’t talk right now,” that they are with someone else and thus are interrupting their time with another person to answer a call from a person that they aren’t going to talk to anyway – what sense does this make?

Are we so addicted to electronics that we’ll go into cardiac arrest or suffer an anxiety meltdown if we don’t respond to the ringtone? Let’s all take a deep breath and not answer the phone if we can’t talk…it really will be ok.