We're not too technologically advanced for the basics

Technology has changed the world right down to the very part of that world I live in myself. It doesn’t take long to gather a long list of things we would have never dreamed of in our younger days.

At the top of that list for me is cell phones. I didn’t have to dial the operator for every call and wait while she connected me, but my family did have a party-line phone service and rotary dial phones. Either of those would blow a young person’s mind today. By the way, the days of dialing an operator are long gone too.

Back then if you had told us that some day we would carry a phone in our pocket with no wires that would remember and dial every phone number we knew we would have laughed out loud at the silliness of it. If you had tried to explain that phone would be able to tell us who was calling before we answered it we would have been flabbergasted. Of course back then no one would have ever thought about actually not answering the phone when it rang anyway.

Alexander Graham Bell couldn’t have known just how silly his first phone conversation with his assistant Thomas Watson would sound to today’s generation.

“Watson come here — I want to see you.”

Amazingly, Watson immediately hung up the phone and went to see Mr. Bell. Today kids text each other from across the room and never look up to make eye contact.

Social networking was once accomplished at the church ice cream social or the country store. These days it’s accomplished without ever leaving the house on Facebook or Twitter. Even families depend on Facetime or a closed text network to keep up with each other. Often we’re so geographically scattered it’s the most practical way to have family time.

Business is no longer done face-to-face with a handshake to consummate the deal. These days we’re lucky if the person you’re doing business with actually speaks to you on the phone. We prefer our transactions online and impersonal. In fact we look at phone calls with a great deal of suspicion, and rightly so.

Our age of communication has caused us to lose a lot that is human in our lives. Young folks have trouble and are genuinely uncomfortable holding an in-person conversation with even people they know and love. They’re frightened to talk with someone they don’t know.

I earned my stripes cold-calling potential customers and even cold-calling folks on the phone for advertising. Lots of folks didn’t get as comfortable as I did with new contacts but we all learned it to some extent back in the day.

After training young people to work on a reception desk for a good part of my life, I really believe that training isn’t outdated, instead it is more necessary than ever to make them complete.

Teach your kids and young employees how to answer the phone clearly and slowly enough to be heard. Teach them to engage long enough to really understand what the caller might be needing. Make sure they know what information to get to take a message and get them to repeat it back.

We’re not too busy or too technologically advanced to do those basic things.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

[email protected]