Detroit women’s book group, maybe 15 years ago. Several of these women were also colleagues at Gale.

When you are speaking with someone, do you prefer to look them in the eye or talk over the phone?

I definitely prefer talking in person. When I was young I spent hours on the phone; my parents were very clever and there was one phone in the house, in the kitchen of course. It was red. It had a rotary dial, which most people under 20 wouldn’t know how to use, I suppose. The one concession was a long cord, long enough to reach into the bathroom or into the basement. I remember sitting on the top step with the door closed and talking and talking.

Beyond getting older and less comfortable holding a small object in my neuropathic hands for long periods, I stopped enjoying spending time on the phone after I was paid to do so. My first post-college job was at Gale Research, in the directories division. We sent out information-gathering forms, not just once but three times, and then we followed up by calling the non-respondents. Remember 11 x 17 printouts, with the holes on the sides that enabled the paper to feed through the printer correctly? It was as tall as me. Well, maybe only to my shoulder, but I’m pretty tall for a woman. I admit we split up the printout, I didn’t do the whole thing myself. But it was everywhere, stacks on my desk, my colleague’s desks, the table hidden behind the file cabinets that we used for meetings. At one point in time I knew the area codes for most of North America. This was before cell phones; this was even before fax machines. But still.

I learned that people speak really fast in New York, much slower in Texas. We kept notes in the margins, when we had called, what the result was. “NA” meant “no answer,” which happened more than you would expect. This was even before voicemail. I remember being grateful when I got through to someone who gave me a meaty answer, because then I could take a break and type up the response into the computer. I also had a typewriter on my desk. This was before PCs, but after the Wang, that’s what I used at the Center for International Programs, one of my college jobs. It was some kind of a database management system…I can’t remember the name on the monitor that took up a huge amount of space, fighting for room with the printouts.

That job changed forever my relationship with the telephone. Although my partner travels a lot for work, and we try to speak every day, the calls are shorter, to the point. I don’t have the patience to spend a lot of time dialing; phones nowadays are too small to fit in the crook of your shoulder, to let you multi-task. I so prefer to just use the phone to set up appointments, make plans for later. I also love texting, with its instant gratification, its 140-characters. Keep it simple. Make it real.