Phone calls

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I found a video of a guy who has classic autism talking about telephones. His descriptions are exactly how I feel about phone calls. I've been dealing with it my whole life and I don't think it's ever going to be better. It's okay, I just avoid them when possible:

The link is below.

I'm glad someone is able to describe it so well.

https://youtu.be/iocIvU3Pf7A

I recognised a lot of his points, especially:

The suddenness of calls I hate being interrupted suddenly, I can't shift focus quickly at the drop of a hat. One workaround is to not answer at the time but call them back when you're better prepared, assuming they're still around by that time. And like he said, if they leave a message saying what they want to talk about, that's helpful.

The poor sound quality and background noises I just feel like giving up when the sound is bad. On a good day I brazenly tell them to repeat things over and over, and tell them "it's a bad line." From my perspective, most lines are bad lines. Everybody should have Skype, a good signal, and a good headset.

Voicemail Now I've got used to leaving messages, it's not so hard, though it tends to lead to them calling me back at some unexpected time.

Alternatives to phoning I love email, much better except you don't get an immediate answer. Texting is good, I wish land lines had text. More likely to get to the recipient when the signal is poor, too. Funny thing is, when I explain my strong preferences for email and text, mostly they ignore me and continue to phone.

I don't have his problem with the loss of facial / body language cues though. I'm quite at home with sound only, I can pick up a lot from that. Faces are often just an unwanted distraction.

I don't have much trouble with phone calls to / from familiar friends, if they're audible at all. Most businesses, service providers, and government officials are another matter. With them it's usually a battle in the first place, trying to get them to co-operate when most of them want to fob me off with nothing or subject me to unwanted add-on marketing questionnaires or ads while I'm waiting for them to do what I've asked them to do. And these days they've all got those tedious menus, muzak, and somebody from a 3rd-world call centre with an unfamiliar accent.

It seems to a really common feature so much so that the majority of AS people strongly experience it.

One huge aspect of this for me is that phones distort voices - and I am hypersensitive to tone when I am talking to people (not on the phone), tone pitch and variation is how I can best accurately gauge the emotional content of what they have to say. Given that this is distorted on the phone, then I am left only with the actual words they say, and one sentence can have five different possible meanings, depending on tonality, pitch, and all those sub-factors of speech. PS: I wonder if this is particularly true re phones for the "musical" subgroup of AS people???

Sometimes I need to close my eyes to understand what they're saying. Because if the place has many visual stimuli, it will drag my attention.

I only have a phone/phone number because my dad wants me to have one in case of an emergency. I rarely give out my number; I usually give my sister's phone number if necessary.

I hate the expectation of spontaneous socialization and rapid communication. I have difficulty transitioning quickly or communicating verbally, but no one understands or accommodates this, so I am left to panic and struggle.

I think for me, it's more of an anxiety thing. Like I had my phone ring tone as the 9th Doctor talking about what T.A.R.D.I.S stands for and that helped with me jumping whenever it went off. I still jumped, but granted, it was less than I do when one of the pre program tones goes off. But it's more, who is this, what they want, why are you calling me, and my mind goes down a rabbit hole of bad things. I much prefer emails, IM's, and texts or video calls.

Yes this is very true for me. In person rely on hearing someone's tone of voice much more than their facial expressions or body language. I rely on the musicality of a person's voice for understanding them. It is definitely distorted over the phone. Not only is the pitch off key, but I can't find the beat either, so I can't tell when it is my turn to speak or not.

And when it comes to being left only with the actual words...well even in person I struggle to understand what people are saying. Over the phone it is even worse with the static and background noises or cell phone signals breaking up the way they do. On a landline the other person's voice usually sounds muffled to me and I have to ask them to repeat themselves. On a cell phone it can sound warbly or watery, or garbled, or robotic or metallic, or pretty much anything.

Phone conversations have been so disastrous for me, I have a horror of them. I can deal with the practical/business oriented phone calls much easier than personal ones, and I think it's because of what you said, because the emotional tone is so important in those and it is distorted.

Yep and yep, to all of that.
His explanation of the suddenness of the phone and the instant demand that someone wants something from you right now and you don't know if you will be able to give that or what it is is so true. Doubly so with the bad attitude of most people who seem to view it as a social sin if you don't pick up the phone immediately whenever they call, regardless of the fact you have other things to do. This is also the reason I don't answer the door - someone on the other side wants something right now and I have had no chance to prepare, think, deliberately school my behaviour / appearance and on and on.
I agree that it is much easier if someone leaves me a message, and I will sometimes reply right away. Then I know who this person is, what they want, whether or not I want to deal with them (which, if you just pickup the phone, you may not even want to deal with that person / issue) and I can have any information they may need such as account information or numbers etc ready and prepared to answer their questions.
I also have misophonia threat response going on so if the phone rings, it is a noise, and I have an involuntary reaction that it is a threat = must stop threat = make the phone stop making that noise, which often means I've 'declined' the person before I even register what I'm doing, just to stop that noise.
The whole thing, I could go on and on. Phones are a nightmare. Email is so much better.

I really hate making phone calls. It scares me. I have gotten better at it over the past couple of years, but it still is difficult for me in a lot of ways. I really hate leaving messages and the anticipation or dread of waiting for someone to call back.

I relate to almost everything mentioned in the video; I too hate an unexpected phone call because it's a sudden demand that I'm not prepared for, and an interruption of whatever I'm doing at that time. Also the same for a knock at the door. I am slow to process optimally when in surprise encounters, be it in person, at the door, or in a phone call.

I strongly relate to not being called in a busy, noisy environment, either me or the caller. I can't focus in the middle of noise all around me.

I hate how people expect you to pick up and are offended if they discover or suspect that you are choosing when to respond. This could be helped if I told people ahead of time that I have issues about the phone -- unfortunately I have not yet felt able to "come out" about that...

I much prefer e-mail. I don't like texting because my phone doesn't have any auto-complete functions and it takes too long to text back.

As for making calls myself -- for a long time into my adult years, this was torture. I was almost phobic about having to pick up a phone and call someone. I only broke through that by forcing myself, when things started to be that I had a motivation to make a call to a stranger (music auditions, job seeking, asking for a prospectus to be sent to me (long before the internet existed and you had to either call or write a letter). It was still hard for me though and I had to gather my courage and pre-script everything I might have to say.

I would say I'm more anxious about making and receiving phone calls. When the conversation starts, I'm normally less anxious. I always put off, to the last minute, making phone calls.

There are times when I have trouble understanding people on the phone--especially if the person has a non-American English accent. If somebody says a word with a "d" sound, I might think they're saying a "b"sound. Perhaps an instance of "oral dyslexia" or "oral dyspraxia--receptive?" If they are actually saying letters, I'll readily mistaken "b" for "d."

I can only understand some of what some of my Trinidadian in-laws say when I'm talking to them on the phone. I have to constantly ask them to repeat what they have said--and I still don't get it at least half the time. I have to ask them to "slow down."

I just had my home phone number changed on Friday. So far, the weekend has been very peaceful, what with the lack of calls from telemarketers, salespeople, and people pretending to be from the IRS.

I am horrendous with that accursed contraption, it takes me half an hour to prepare a phonecall to make a gp appointment, I have a social worker woman who does my phonecalls for me, I've got into piles of messes throughout my life due to my inability to initiate and engage with this daunting device. I communicate in writing or awkwardly face to face, I cannot do telephones at all. I don't understand why people prefer phonecalls to emails or texts. When I was in job centre limbo for years I was pressured to make phone calls constantly and even almost dumped into a call centre job, that time wasn't particularly merry!

I get nothing out of telephone calls and have nothing but bad memories in my past from navigating the treacherous phone echo chamber mostly.

When the phone rings, it feels like those falling dreams, it's a sudden despair followed by me shaking, my heart racing throughout the entire call and a huge relief after hanging.

Once I put off booking a visit to the doctor for a whole year because I had to call them to do it.

And then when it ends, NTs usually say "See? It didn't even hurt"... Yes, it did!

You know nothing, NT! Nothing!

I really hate the telephone, too. It bothers me to no end when my mom asks me to call someone up to ask something when a simple e-mail will do the trick, and half the time people are away and can't answer the phone anyway. What happens most of the time is I'll just sit for minutes thinking about the conversation and preparing myself, then my mom gets impatient and dials the number herself, waits for someone to answer, forcing me to talk and have this short, meaningless, nerve racking conversation.
When I'm home by myself, I never answer the phone because it's always either a telemarketer or someone wanting to talk to my parents.

I never know when its my turn to speak on a phone conversation and will end up cuttinh the other person off multiple times without meaning to. The only use I have for phone conversations is to make requests or share information, I have no desire whatsover to talk on the phone for social purposes.