I shouldn't have to sit through your podcast because you're too lazy to type.
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There’s a reason it’s not polite to shove a copy of Mein Kampf into your buddy’s face and demand that they read the whole thing in order to maintain a licence to continue speaking with you. It’s unpleasant, boring and frankly too much stupid self-indulgence.
Excruciating long voice notes
Honestly, nobody’s friendship is worth that. What if a friend approached you, armed with a copy of their step-mother’s fiction about the sexual struggles of a “fictitious” woman trying marriage for the third time? They’d open by claiming to be sorry for making you read the book, but still make you read it. If they really were sorry, they could read the book themselves and give you the summary of middle age disappointment but that would require them to do the work they instead just pass on to you.
“Sorry for the voice note but ummmm, it’s too long to type, ummm hi, how are you? Uhmm so I … and you totally can say no … but I’m just trying because y’know, lol, you don’t get anything if you don’t ask for it. So like, uhmmm, do you wanna meet up for lunch?”
Ironically, just listening to that, you know you’d be stuck at lunch facing somebody who will struggle to look up from their phone. And that whole excruciating experience in listening to English going through a 7th trimester abortion could have been easily reduced to a far more consumable, “Hi, how’s lunch tomorrow?” text.
I shouldn’t have to sit through your podcast that not even your mom would willingly listen to because you’re too lazy to type. I certainly shouldn’t have to sit through you making up your thoughts as you go along.
People think it’s rude not to respond to a two-minute voice note. I love that. It’s particularly satisfying when you look at it, see it’s long and then don’t even bother playing it. It’s one of the few moments in life where somebody can engage you in a manner tantamount to an act of war and your response could be such indifference.
When you run into them later and get the annoyed and entitled, “why didn’t you listen to my voice note?” you are placed in a wonderful position to fire off a glorious dig at their unrelenting and ignorant awfulness. I give you the following three to try and make yourself feel better:
- I will once my transcriber sends your essay back to me
- It’s on my playlist right after I finish up my Jane Eyre audiobook; and
- I did start but I need to listen in chunks. This morning I finished chapter 17.
A voice note does have some benefits if it’s a quick burst of information that has been thought out. It can be great even. Five minutes rolling down the escarpment of shredded, jagged language being reconstructed as a dialect of the recently lobotomised is not the best use of the technology, nor the most enjoyable.
Think about what you want to say
This is why we can’t have nice things. The ability to share thoughts conveniently through voice doesn’t excuse the lack of thinking before hitting record. There are real time phone calls that have more coherence than the voice notes clogging up most phones.
But today’s youth see an incoming call and have an anxiety attack because it signals having to speak with somebody unprepared – a pending conversation they haven’t spent the last five days agonising over in preparation. Somehow exposing one’s stupidity in real time is more frightening than doing it in a format that could be replayed on repeat.
And frankly, if you are engaged in such a correspondence where long voice notes are preferable because typing it all out is just too much effort, it’s unlikely that you’d possess the required RAM to recall the first half of a two-minute audio clip anyway.
If the GNU is going to make South Africa better, an executive order condemning any producer of a 31+ second voice note to a harsh penalty would be an ideal start.
