Phone-bia

I realized something yesterday - phones scare me. I mean, if I have any other way to interact with someone (email, go see them, send carrier pigeon, whatever) over calling them, I'm all over it. Strange, no?

I think this comes from two personal tendancies. The first is that I'm an introvert and hate interacting with people, especially people I don't really know (okay, one may now ask why an introvert is starting a blog, but I'm sure that's worth another separate entry and years of therapy!). But the second reason, I think, is more interesting. I find talking to people on the phone incredibly, incredibly awkward. I mean, how many times have you called someone and then got stuck with pregnant pauses, unsure of what to say next? You know, you wish your Dad a happy Father's Day or call an old friend to wish them a Happy Birthday, and the moment you have said, "Happy Birthday" you're hemming and haughing on what to say next? Not that every call is like that - sometimes you can sit and talk with someone intensly for hours. But the awkward times are so awkward as to turn me off from the experience. And now with email, instant messaging, and the like, I can still converse with people, just not with actual sound.

So my question is, is this just a personal quirk, or is this something endemic to the phone as a medium? Does the phone itself encourage or create the awkwardness, with all of us standing around listening and waiting for someone else to say something? The phone demands so much of us when we use it (focus on conversation, shutting out of distractions) that each pregnant pause is an eternity; the same pause at the dinner table is just a good reason to move on to dessert. Or do I have a phone phobia?