Talk, don't talk Rural Ramblings

At the risk of sounding like my parents and grandparents. Things were different when I was younger. Take the telephone for example. A ground-breaking invention that has evolved into mobile communications where we’re carrying not telephones really but mini computers around with us. We can be up to date with what’s happening, or allegedly what’s happening, bank, shop, pay bills watch TV watch movies, play games and more. I mean really, who has time for work anymore?

Back in the day. The phone sat in the house and every call was important you just had to answer it. We had a phone book so big you could use it as a weapon and almost everyone and everything you needed to call was in it. Better yet, a number was a direct line through to where you needed to address your question or problem. You got a real person every time and chances are you might even know them.

My first job when I left college was working in a bank, during which time I went back to college two days a week. It was five years before I decided that banking wasn’t for me. Anyway, customers could phone direct through to their own branch, speak to a real person, even the manager. Again, if the customer had been with the bank a while it was highly likely that they would be known personally. Decisions weren’t made on credit scores but hard financial facts and what the bank manager knew about them personally and their family. I can’t remember any loans going wrong during my five-year tenure at a city banking office in the mid 1970s.

We still have a home phone. However, when it rings we regard it with suspicion. So many spam calls, phishing calls, trying to trick someone into saying “yes” and doubless recording it, press a number to have your account raided. I spend more time blocking spam numbers than I do using the phone.

Corporations, governments even individual politicians now resort to making robo calls for marketing and information gathering. So much cheaper, they say. From a personal standpoint if I get a such a call I take the view that if the person or organisation can’t be bothered to talk to me personally then I can’t be bothered to take the call. A robo call is an instant hang up for me. Is it any wonder why surveys and polls are skewed nowadays, and customer relations are not good? If you want quality information, work for it, reward people for it. It’s not rocket science.

We live in a world where the opportunities for communication are endless yet, many of us don’t communicate at all. As a journalist I also find it ironic that often the bigger an organisation is the harder it is to communicate with it. Maybe we need to go back to basics?