Wrong numbers: the modern guide to phone etiquette

I am old enough to remember when telephoning was something that happened by the front door, at a desk or in a phone box. The greatest irritation it would ever cause would be either the phone ringing at an inconvenient hour, occasional earpiece spillover (in the manner of ‘The Colonel’ berating Dick Dastardly), or bearing witness to someone on a call making the occasional Sybil Fawlty-style response of “Oh, I know!”. All that, however, changed with the mobile. Life changed with the mobile. 

In 1988 I was working for Sky TV at its former HQ in London’s West End. One lunchtime my newly appointed boss (I went through several during my five years at the company…) went out for a haircut at a barber’s just a few doors down the road. Shortly after he left the phone on my desk phone rang: “Poulter!” he barked (Frenchifying my name to rhyme with ‘Voltaire’). “I’m out of cigarettes.” Resisting the temptation to ask what I could do about it, given that the barber was next door to a newsagent, I replied: “Where are you calling from?”. Him: “The barber’s. I’m using my new mobile phone.” It was one of those Motorola housebricks that was proliferating amongst Gordon Gekko types in the City, yelling “Sell, sell, SELL!” or “Buy, buy, BUY!” into them before the battery gave out (usually after a matter of minutes).

His call was probably the first time I’d received one from someone using a mobile, let alone from a two-minute walk away, and certainly for anything as clearly performative as simply to say they’d run out of fags. I tell this story purely to highlight the fact that, while the act of calling from a mobile was no less unexpected than if he had called me from a landline (and frequently did with much the same request), the ability to make calls from anywhere to anyone heralded an irreversible shift of etiquette.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the very first mobile phone call being made, although it would be the early 90s before mass adoption of handsets would take off. Today there are more mobile phones in use than there are people. An entire generation has grown up only knowing the smartphone, which now accounts for almost 90% of phones in use. However, with that generation, and the ubiquity of those devices, their use has also become a source of annoyance for many on a scale of irate never imaginable when I took that call from my boss in the barber’s chair 35 years ago.

Now, before I go further, I should declare a vested interest: I’m not against the mobile phone, not only being wedded to mine from wake-up alarm to last thing at night, but also having worked for the last 13 years in the telecommunications industry, both for companies who make mobile networks, and companies that provide services over them. I came into the industry from consumer electronics only three years after Apple had introduced its first iPhone, customarily taking something from someone else and making it better. This was still the 3G era, when being able to look up a web page on a handset was a rudimentary and sluggish experience. Then came 4G, bringing us something approaching mobile broadband (and with it video and audio streaming), before more recently 5G doing much the same thing, only theoretically faster. But the thing is, as these revolutions in information and social connectivity have taken place, the phone call - surely the primary reason for owning a phone in the first place, has started taking a back seat.

Picture: Apple

This has prompted Debrett’s, the authority on all that’s good and proper, to highlight the clear generational divide between those under 40 and those over, and their attitudes to phone use. The younger you are, it suggests, the less likely you are to use a phone for conversing with people. If they do, it says, there is greater likelihood of decades of ‘telephone manner’, as it used to be called, being trashed.

Easily the primary peeve of any respectful individual who travels on public transport is the phone call (or FaceTime) conducted loudly without headphones, or even with headphones where the wearer has no idea just how annoyingly loud they are (ditto: conference call headsets in an office, but that’s another blog post entirely). Nothing seems to draw more ‘tssking’ and pass-agg glances in the direction of the callee than on a train, although the advent of in-flight WiFi and presents a new horror, as business types on planes, unable to switch off for a few hours, try to connect for Zoom while zooming in and out of satellite coverage at 38,000 feet. It’s all so redolent of Bob Mortimer’s brilliant Train Guy persona: “Ya, ya! Have a campachoochoo on me, ya! You are, as always, a vigorous pigeon. And of course, ciao and bella pommefritio”. 

“If you’re making a video call in a public space (or if you’re just too lazy to hold the phone up to your ear) you must use headphones or earbuds,” Debrett’s instructs. “Nobody should be forced to listen to your phone conversation; it will be annoyingly distracting and might be intrusive or embarrassing. The person at the other end might object if they realise their conversation is audible to a train carriage full of unwilling eavesdroppers.” Hal-le-lu-jah.

Almost as annoying are those you know are using a speakerphone to multi-task, making the occasional “Yeah” or “OK” while they clack away at their keyboards. This, Debrett’s notes, is a recent phenomenon. “We carry our phones everywhere and think nothing of making calls when we’re on crowded transport, walking down noisy streets, doing the washing up, cooking the children’s tea,” it says. “Not only are these calls often annoyingly inaudible, it is also perfectly obvious that you are making them while doing something else. This can be very alienating for the recipient, who feels marginalised and deprioritised.”

Many of these traits have been adopted by younger mobile phone users, rather than older generations brought up to answer the phone, while standing to attention: “Whitehall 1212, how may I help you”. Indeed, such is the generational divide of these personal communication faux pas, that Debrett’s has now published its “ten commandments of mobile etiquette”. 

First up is a rule which negates the notion that young people want to be called in the first place. An unexpected call, it says, is to be ignored (or feared) and sent to voicemail. According to Debrett’s Gen-Z is more likely to send texts, WhatsApp messages, voice notes and even e-mail rather than make calls, or even leave voicemail. “In general, people seem to be much happier using less direct methods. But we are still faced with a social conundrum: if everyone carries the means of communication in their pocket, why are they so elusive and unreachable?”. To this it points out that, in the pre-mobile era, to not answer the phone when it rang was to be “deeply eccentric”.

Thus, Debrett’s commands that before making a call a text should first be sent to enquire if the recipient is available to speak, surely the telephonic equivalent of the early days of the automobile when a lackey walked in front of one waving a red flag to broadcast its onset. “This preamble might seem cumbersome to traditional phone addicts who love nothing more than spontaneously picking up the phone,” says Debrett’s, “but it is considered a much less stressful way of initiating contact since it minimises intrusion and enables people to manage their own time.”

In further contravention of what made Alexander Graham Bell’s leg it down to the patent office, calls made out social intent aren’t meant to be answered. It is perfectly acceptable, Debrett’s says, for a call to be registered as “missed” and returned at a more convenient moment. Knowing how long it takes younger members of my family to even read, let alone reply to a WhatsApp, this piece of etiquette reduces telephony to the speed and efficiency of postal communications (and I’m talking here about horse-borne couriers in Elizabethan times). Beware, though, as repeated calls - leading to a string of “missed call” alerts - will only raise the recipient’s blood pressure. “Unless there is a real emergency - in which case it would be sensible to send a text - it is an unjustified intrusion, likely to alienate the recipient.” Should a voicemail be left (and if so, it’s “a matter of taste” for doing so), they should be kept brief.

Business calls, on the other hand, are “a different matter and are likely to be answered with much more willingness and alacrity”, while voicemail is “a matter of taste” but messages should be kept brief, if left at all. Debrett’s is not suggesting that phone calls shouldn’t be made, but it says that a call out of the blue can trigger an alarm: “People are more likely to react to them with panic or dread. If, for example, you see a call flashing up on your phone from your child’s school you instantly leap to the conclusion that there has been an accident”. Authority figures, such as doctors, should begin any phone call by reassuring the recipient that they are not about to die, although it also advises that while text messages are an acceptable way to congratulate someone, they should not be used to offer condolences. “There are some instances where the human voice must take priority,” Debrett’s says sagely. “Texts are an economical way of communicating but they are not good when it comes to nuance.”

Debrett’s Ten Commandments Of Phone Etiquette

1. Text before calling
2. If no answer, send a text
3. Don't repeatedly call unless an an emergency
4. Don't leave a voicemail
5. Be aware people may find unsolicited calls alarming
6. If someone says it's a bad time to talk, call back later
7. Be tolerant of older people's habits
8. Don't take calls in public spaces,
9. If you do, use headphones
10. If it's important or sending condolences, call

The New Rules of Mobile Eitquette (debretts.com)

Anti-social behaviour

I blame Tim Lovejoy. His raving about Twitter, 14 years ago, convinced me to dive in. Such was his endorsement of the social media platform on BBC2’s Something For The Weekend (before it transferred to Channel 4 as Sunday Brunch) that I had to give it a go. 

It was a bit of a laugh back then, with people posting stupid cat videos and making witty remarks about their breakfast. With tweets originally restricted to 140 characters, it started the culture of ‘micro blogging’. Over time, it evolved into an invaluable source of almost immediate information generated by media organisations and businesses, as well as individuals disseminating Things They Know. It created its own luminaries, too - must-read accounts authored by smart, witty people who could write with erudition (and knew the difference between “your” and “you’re”, as well as the role a possessive apostrophe plays in basic grammar). Most of all, it was free. Free! 

But, then – and I’m conveniently truncating history here – Donald Trump came along, and his deranged early morning, stream of consciousness, all-caps tweets (written, we assumed, while he was conducting the day’s first ablutions) started to take Twitter into a very different direction. We had entered the ‘post-truth’ era, and before you knew it, Twitter had become bad for your mental health - especially if you’re susceptible to the grifting of certain politicians and their equally gaslighting acolytes. Views long-banished to the darkened recesses of society were propelled to the surface, or near enough.

Oddly, though, that hasn’t been the worst development. That arguably occurred when Elon Musk paid $44 billion for the platform last October, set about firing half of its employees, and introduced a new subscription model in a clumsy attempt to make it generate more income. Ever since, Twitter has been a raging bin fire of functional and policy changes – believed to be instigated by ‘Space Karen’ himself – that have made the platform a significantly less fun place to be.

For some, this last Saturday may have proven to be the final straw. “Rate limit exceeded – Please wait a few moments then try again” appeared in the place of up-to-the-minute missives about whatever. Twitter appeared to be down. The hashtags #ratelimitexceeded and #twitterdown started trending, except no-one could read the tweets born by them. No-one – with perhaps the exception of Musk – knew what the hell was going on. Twitter wasn’t down - it had been intentionally broken by its owner.

In, oddly, one of the few tweets you could read, Musk later explained what had happened: “To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: - verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day; - Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day; - New unverified accounts to 300/day.”

Immediately there was a collective realisation that Musk was having another dummy-spitting episode about something. He was doing it knowingly, too. Twitter (or Musk) would later raise the restrictions to 8,000/800/400 tweets viewed and then 10,000/1,000/500 respectively, with the South African billionaire clearly finding the whole exercise – and the brouhaha it generated - funny. 

“You awake from a deep trance, step away from the phone to see your friends and family,” he wrote in another tweet. He then trolled users further by posting: “Oh the irony of hitting view limits due to complaining about view limits,” after people had exceeded their cap by posting the “Rate limited exceeded” message and asking what it meant. Many concluded that “data scraping” and “system manipulation” claims had something to do with AI harvesting (other social media platforms have expressed similar concerns) and didn’t want anyone or anything else to profit from Twitter. 

However, given that Saturday’s action effectively shut off Twitter’s basic functionality to its users - and therefore eyeballs belonging to the platform’s lucrative advertising audience - the whole exercise seemed like another gallon of petrol thrown in the blazing bin. Industry analysts said the latest chaos would not help maintain advertisers’ interest in the platform, with one saying that the stunt was “remarkably bad” for them. “This certainly isn’t going to make it any easier to convince advertisers to return [to Twitter]. It’s a hard sell already to bring advertisers back,” Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg told Reuters, a point of view backed by media buying agencies openly advising clients against using the platform.

Only last month former NBC-Universal advertising chief Linda Yaccarino started work as Twitter CEO with a brief of improving the company’s commercial activity. In fact, according to the Financial Times, Yaccarino had been specifically tasked with restoring relationships with the advertising community, relationships that had been strained since Musk’s takeover and his subsequent tinkering. One industry figure told Reuters that Yaccarino represented the “last best hope” of saving Twitter, which has seen its market value drop to just a quarter of what Musk paid for it.

Key to advertisers staying with Twitter is it continuing to deliver those eyeballs, but in that, no knows for certain how many accounts the platform has, or how many have been closed down since Musk’s takeover (the company no longer discloses how many accounts it has - the last time it did it reported 330 million active monthly users). Several high profile figures, like Sir Elton John have, though, stopped using it since October. 

But for some end users, however, Saturday may well have been the final straw following months of constant, clumsy tinkering: the provocative adoption of Musk’s “free speech absolutism”; introducing the ‘curated’ For You channel no one had asked for (but is oddly addictive); bringing in ‘verified’, subscription-based accounts, replacing previous Blue Tick arrangement for prominent account holders; the arrival of a Wild West of spam and even illegal advertising. 

On Saturday evening, many people - including me - went scurrying off to look for alternative social media outlets that could do the job Twitter had, until relatively recently, done pretty well. The truth is, there aren’t any or, at least, weren’t. There are venerable discussion platforms like Reddit, Tumblr and Mastodon, which has a similar interface to Twitter. There are rivals in development, too, like Bluesky, the semi-available app being developed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. 

None, however, appear to offer the immediacy and – when it was good – reliability of Twitter to keep abreast of world events in real time. Which is why, despite Saturday’s nonsense, many users I know, as well as most of the accounts I follow, were operating as usual yesterday. But with the threat of Musk continuing to tamper with what had once been perfectly good (it just struggled to make any money), there is still an open opportunity for someone to offer a direct rival.

Step forward, then, the direct rival – Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook founder and, now, CEO of the Meta empire that owns that original social network, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, will this week launch Threads. 

Available to download from the Apple App Store on Thursday, it will be functionally very similar to Twitter by being -  according to App Store blurb - a “text-based conversation app,” and a place “where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today, to what’ll be trending tomorrow.” 

Threads will enable users to post short messages, with images and links to web pages, as well as engage with them through likes reshares. Given that many people on Twitter also have Instagram accounts, Threads users will be able to easily connect to the accounts they follow on that platform.

Given that Musk is said to have challenged Zuckerberg to an actual cage fight, Threads could be the Meta boss’s ultimate counter-strike. According to The Verge, Meta’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, said at a recent company meeting that Threads will be “our response to Twitter”, adding that it was being developed in response to “creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run,” a barb clearly aimed at Musk.

Not that a Meta-run version of Twitter will be perfect. In its pursuit of profits, Facebook has become, at times, an impenetrable forest of sponsored accounts no one asked for, with functional tinkering of its own making it less of a chronological timeline of posts as a miasma of random items and spam ads. And, to cap it all, ads clearly generated by deep mining of browser activities on devices using Facebook and Instagram. 

It’s safe to assume that Threads will make use of the same algorithms. Nor would you bet against Meta applying a tier-based subscription model to it as Musk has done with Twitter. The problem with free stuff is that sooner or later someone decides that it needs paying for.

However, what might determine Threads’ success is the loyalty with which Twitter users remain attached to it. Even after Saturday’s events, and my own search for an alternative (largely to ensure I have something to look at when Musk breaks Twitter for good), it’s a difficult opiate to be weaned off. 

Anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom will have access to newswires constantly churning out headlines – click bait before the phrase was even coined – and the Twitter death scroll has fulfilled much the same service. Even in Musk’s batshit-mad world of peppering your feed with ads for things you have no interest in at all (yes, you, Omaze and your bloody million pound house!), it is still, mostly, populated by tweets from organisations we can be individually interested in or, if you choose the ‘For You’ channel, tweets you have an uncannily unexpected appreciation of.

However, with each new belligerent act by Musk, regardless of whether he is genuinely trying to introduce some commercial reality to the platform (or just being disruptive for larks), the Twitter experience gets ever more wearisome. Zuckerberg knows this. He has considerable muscle (Instagram has around two billion monthly active users, according to Meta), but has also shown himself to be very adept at assimilating concepts from elsewhere (Facebook’s feature for ‘disappearing’ stories seemed to have been lifted from Snapchat, just as short-form video ‘reels’ looked a lot like TikTok). So, if anyone can break the Twitter habit, surely it will be him.