Confessions of A Naughty Girl

Phone Etiquette

Okay, here's the deal. Over the past couple of weeks, various friends have requested that I address phone etiquette, so last week I posted a poll on this site to gauge what you thought proper etiquette was in terms of returning a phone call if you are on the receiving end of an initial contact, or when to expect a call back, if you are on the initiating side of contact and want know whether someone's into you or not.

Judging by the poll, half (that would also be known as 50%) of you agreed with my initial call, which was that if someone calls you on Wednesday night, you should return the call by Friday if you are interested. Conversely, if you call someone on Wednesday night and do not receive a phone call by Friday, either move on or prepare to spend some more time with Fingula and Awristula because chances are, this person is not into you.

If we were to convert time into a unit of mathematical measure, this means that a person should return a phone call within roughly a day and a half to two days from when the initial phone call was placed. For our more challenged readers, I have made the following helpful cheat sheet:

If the call is made on [first day listed] , interested response should be by [second day listed]:

Sunday, Tuesday night
Monday, Wednesday night
Tuesday, Thursday night
Wednesday, Saturday night*
Thursday, Sunday night*
Friday, Monday night
Saturday, Monday night

*Weekend phone calls have extra allotted time, as they are generally the most socially busy time of the week and include allowance for out-of-town travel, excessive drinking/long-term recovery from excessive drinking, or weekend guests.

This is a general rule - exceptions are always a given. Think of exceptions as the same types of things that would excuse you from school back in the day - illness, death in the family, having Cingular service, pants-wetting, or, in this newfangled age of technology, lost cell phones/lost your number. (But be very cautious when analyzing the lost cell phone excuse, as people can and will use this excuse to trip you up and mess with you, or because they are wimpy. Best to wait it out a little longer and give them another shot before making a call on someone who uses the "lost cell phone/number" excuse.)

Also, please note drunk dials/booty calls do not apply to this schematic for a number of reasons:

a) Drunk calls are at the receiver's discretion. The receiver is never obligated to return a booty call, even if they are interested, because you were a dumb f*cker and couldn't even call the person sober, and shitty behavior begets shitty behavior (this does not apply to platonic drunk-dials, as the motive is generally free of sexual desire);
b) Booty calls are generally made between the hours of 1-5 am CST (hey, I live in Illinois, so I'm applying this to me), which would throw off the entire schematic, since the initial call would be considered early-morning hours;
c) Booty calls have a lower return in response rate because it is difficult to ascertain whether to take them seriously, whether they want you to call them back after the booty call time period, and they also depend on whether or not you are currently hooking up at that time and are not physically able to take their call (if this is the case, props to you, dirty bird)

Any questions?

posted by KA @ 10:29 PM