Are you aware there are people alive today who have never used any kind of phone other than a smartphone?
This will definitely date Yours Truly, but I remember a rotary phone (imagine the phone to the right in a wretched tan color) for a time when I was growing up. For those of you who do not immediately know how these types of phones work, be advised that in order to disconnect the call, you had to press a physical button in the phone cradle. You could do this with your fingers, of course, but the button was conveniently located so that as soon as you put the handset down in the cradle, the button would be pushed. Such a clever design.
Now, imagine such a phone mounted on the wall at about head height, and it doesn’t take too much of a stretch to understand the phrase “hang up the phone.”
Hanging up the phone became synonymous with “we are done speaking with each other, so let us disconnect this call.”
[Sidebar: Ah, landlines. We could spend so much time talking about landlines. Remember when…
…you could pick up one handset and listen in on the conversation someone was having in another room?
... you had to not be on the phone if you wanted to use the internet, and your dad would pick up the other phone in the house to tell you to get off the phone so he could use the dial-up?
... you had to dial '1' before anything that was long distance? Or when you didn’t need to type in an area code because the call was “local”?]
Anyway, there really is a point to all this, and that is understanding the concept of “hanging up the phone.”
I consider myself an expert in the etiquette of phone calls: it’s one of the many skills you pick up when you talk to as many people as I do in a week. At the end of most phone calls, one person might say “good bye” or “have a good day” or something similar to indicate the discussion is over. It doesn’t really matter who gives the verbal cue - once a verbal cue is given, anyone can hang up. Straightforward.
For reasons I cannot explain, there has been a significant increase lately of people who don't end the call at the end of a conversation.
Now, you're probably thinking, Why don't you just hang up?
It’s a reasonable question, and the answer is: I usually do.
Sometimes, though, I'm in the middle of typing out a comment, or my headset isn't cooperating, or I’m a human who got distracted (squirrel!) by something right at the tail end of the call and my attention is elsewhere.
Sometimes, when that happens, the person on the other end of the line also does not disconnect, and that’s when things get weird.
Did the person think they ended the call but did not hit the end call button properly?
Did the person forget to end the call and just put the phone down? (Yes, I do know this guy.)
Are they waiting to see how long it'll take for me to hang up?
When it gets to the point where it is well past the time that the other party should have hung up the phone (a duration entirely based on my mood, whether my hot chocolate was hot that morning, or whether it rained last Tuesday), and I’m in a mood to embrace the weird…I’ll put myself on mute and wait. Most of the time, the call will only last several seconds before the other person realizes it's still connected and hang up. However, I recently wasted (invested?) an entire forty-something seconds sitting on mute on a still-connected call listening to someone b**** about how nobody would hire him. And of course, it wasn’t his fault!
(Pause for me to add a comment to his file about what was overheard in that situation.)
Here's a tidbit of advice from Yours Truly to you: If the conversation is over, hang up the phone. To coin a phrase: just do it. Do not presume the person on the other end will disconnect first. She could be [a weirdo] listening on mute to you gripe about how nobody will hire you.
Oh, and in that hypothetical scenario: odds are good that she won’t hire you, either.
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