Italians are crazy people! They talk all the time! About what? Food, soccer and politics.
You enter a bar and you hear someone talking about last night’s match or about a new pizzeria, opened next door.
I don’t know, how many times I wanted to shout at girls – even adults – on trains, when they grabbed their phone to tell their mum, what they had for lunch. No, you can’t believe it: “Hi mum, yes, I ate. No, it was not too bad. It was lasagne. Yes, the Bechamel was fresh, but the ragout tasted too much like tomato. I don’t think, they cooked it enough” and so on and so forth for forty minutes! I mean, is it really necessary to call you mum, before you get home to tell her, what you ate??? Can’t you just cut off the navel string and let her live?
This kind of my reaction gave me thinking though, when I was at #iapti2013. It was a rush one-day-conference – like speedy dating – and obviously we talked all the time. Just like Italians about food, we had our talks about translations. Every aspect of it was taken into zillions of pieces. (I realized around lunch time, that my voice had just gone! I continuously had to drink and cough. Well, yes…we all knew, who worked as an interpreter and who was a translator.
Today, as the coronation of my aversion for talking I just realized, that I rather chat with someone, than talk over the phone.
A very brief history of my talking habits:
1989 we have our first phone in house, I measure how lucky the day is on the number of people, who call me (in Hungary talking over the phone was costly)
1999 I pay 400 German Marks per month on phone calls (first year, I knew Giorgio, we talked for hours…he lived in Italy, me in Munich)
2000 I buy my first cell phone and don’t understand, why SMS is such a big invention
2013 I keep in touch with my friends and people, I know on fring, viber, whatsapp, hangouts, g+, FB, twitter, instagram, foursquare, linkedin, myheritage, wechat, wordpress, youtube, skype, runkeeper BUT THE PHONE’S PHONING FUNCION.
My life exploded, I am in contact with so many people, on so many channels, talking about so many things, that I don’t miss talking on the phone (often multitask and when I have a real skype conversation, parallel to that I check my emails, my FB messages, send likes on linkedin) Sometimes I really feel, like a 7-headed dragon (in Hungary it is THE MONSTER for kids, I know, elsewhere it has one head only. Just recall a cute Hungarian story about a one headed dragon, who was chased from home, because he only had one head…Anyway…this doesn’t mean, that multitasking would be a Hungarian invention, does it?)!
I don’t understand, why I still use a phone and pay for a phone number. I talk rarely on it. So yesterday, when a very good new friend of mine asked me for my phone number I obviously give it to him with the advice though: Don’t call me!
Not, because I don’t want to know about him, we send e-mails, tweet, chat, skype on a daily basis, but because I don’t want to phone!
I have no conclusion, it is like fashion maybe, or convenience?
Keeping in touch on time-shifted channels allows you to include more people, but doesn’t bind you to do it in the very second, when the other party is free to be with you. By chatting you have 10-30 seconds or a minute of time before responding and the conversation can still be considered to be continuous. You still can manage to do other things, be present elsewhere. A phone call? Cuts you off.
When I was around 30, I wanted to live in a remote house breeding animals and growing wheat. Basically nothing changed since then, but now to keep in touch I would’n install a phone, but would need an optical fiber connection to the net. Yes, the internet.
