Somebody Called Me on the Telephone

It was twenty past eight. The screen said a name I have known for sixteen years. And the thought I had, before anything else, in the half second before I picked up, was: what has happened.

Nothing had happened. He was walking home and he thought of a thing and he rang. We talked for fifty minutes about approximately nothing — a road that has been dug up, a film neither of us finished, a mutual friend's new job.

I have written a lot here about the fade, about friendships that end without anybody ending them, and I have blamed the group chat for most of it. I want to correct myself slightly. The group chat is not what killed the phone call. What killed the phone call is that an unscheduled call became a signal of emergency, and once it is a signal of emergency you cannot use it for nothing.

Fifty minutes. About nothing. It was the best thing that happened to me this week and I have been faintly embarrassed about that fact for two days.

The pitch is that it respects your time. You listen when you want. Nobody is interrupted. All of that is true and it is not the whole thing.

What a voice note actually does is move the entire cost onto the listener. The sender speaks for four minutes with no editing and no obligation to be brief, because being brief is work, and the medium has removed the one thing that used to enforce it, which was another person waiting to talk.

Then I listen at one and a half speed, which everybody does and nobody admits, and I get through it in two minutes and forty seconds having received a version of my friend's voice that is slightly wrong.

I am not against them. I have sent three this week. I am saying that a four-minute voice note and a four-minute phone call are not the same object, and we have all quietly agreed to pretend they are because the second one requires both of us to be free at once, and none of us can arrange that any more.

The group message went up at about eight in the morning, posted by the person who always posts it, and then fourteen replies arrived over the next two hours, most of them within the first twenty minutes of somebody reading it.

That is not nothing. I want to be fair about it. Fourteen people took an action, and the fact that the action was cheap does not mean it was insincere.

But the message I have kept came the following afternoon from somebody who is not in that group and who has got the date wrong by one day every year since about 2019. No prompt. No list. He simply remembers, incorrectly, and has never once been corrected because none of us are going to be the person who corrects that.

The difference is not effort. It is that a notification produces a message about my birthday and a memory produces a message about me. Fourteen people did the first thing. It was kind. And it evaporated by lunchtime, and the wrong-day one is in a screenshot folder.