Is Everything OK? An Experiment in Cold Calling

I phoned a friend. It wasn't pretty.

I’m conducting a radical social experiment. I’ve started calling my friends. Sometimes they even pick up.

It began when I grew weary of texting. So many typos. And I’m such a bad speller that even the most generous auto-correct can’t figure out that the word I’m trying to write is mellifluous. (I’m a poetic texter.) And sometimes texting just has its limits. There is only so much you can say in the little green box that is meaningful beyond, “Sorry, I’m running late.”

The more sophisticated and multi-functional phones are, the less we actually use them for calling. But one day, I impulsively (I begin most of my projects impulsively) put aside the Substack scrolling, photo taking, music listening and navigating and tried an underused capacity of my mini computer. I phoned a friend.

Much to my amazement, he picked up. “Who died?” he asked with concern. “Is everything OK?” This is the inevitable response to the rare unsolicited, unscheduled incoming call. What better indication of the end of the friendly phone call can be found? It is now a harbinger of death and destruction, rather than the opportunity for a quick friendly catch-up. The last time my brother called me without warning, other than our weekly catch-up, was to ask “Are you watching this?” as the Capitol was being stormed on Jan. 6.

Americans spend a ridiculous amount of time on their phones, both texting and calling. According to the industry trade group CTIA, “Americans exchanged nearly 2.2 trillion SMS and MMS text messages last year [2024], more than any other year besides 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, Americans are using their voices more to keep in touch — they collectively spent over 2.4 trillion minutes talking on the phone.” That comes out to about 20 minutes a day. So we still talk on the phone constantly, just rarely to each other, and almost never by surprise.

Part of that is certainly demographic. Older people still have experience with landlines, when there was only one number per household. (Amazing, right? And ice was delivered in large blocks.) The phone would ring and you would pick it up without any idea of who was calling or what they were calling for. (For that reason, my father refused to answer the telephone. I don’t recall him ever answering the phone.)

I’m batting about .500 in my attempt to revive the spontaneous call. About half the people pick up, at least the first time I call. My siblings and wife almost always pick up. With others, it’s more of a crap shoot. Still, many people seem happy to have a brief chat, once they realize there has not been a fatal car crash. However, if I call back the same person a week or so later, my success rate drops sharply. I experience the pain of being screened. I do generally get a quick text back after a screened call, asking, “Everything OK?”

It’s not surprising that people are so zealously screening incoming calls. Phones now come loaded with functions expressly designed to help you not receive phone calls. Do Not Disturb, Focus Mode, Silence Unknown Callers. Apple has effectively built an anti-phone into the phone to help deflect social troglodytes like me. The device is more enthusiastic about blocking calls than answering them.

So what to do when screened? Even I know not to leave a voicemail. Apple could no doubt charge more for an iPhone that came without a voicemail feature. Few leave them (Hi Grandma!) and even fewer listen to them. The rare voicemail is usually announced by a text: “I just left you a voicemail.”

Don’t be alarmed. There are large tranches of people who I will not call out of the blue. Anyone who bills by the hour is safe from me intruding on their time. Likewise for anyone who works on deadline. For them, the country song: “When your phone don’t ring, it will be me.” The rest of you, consider yourself warned.