Early Results

One thing that has precipitated out of this whole process already is that I find myself using the telephone to contact people, instead of sending e-mails. I've been living on the internet for most of the last 10 years both personally and professionally, and I have come to prefer e-mail to telephone in many ways. It has less potential to disrupt me (when receiving a call) or someone else (when making a call), and it affords me the ability to compose my thoughts very carefully and make sure I make all of the points I wish to make or ask all of the questions I want to ask. Years of bad customer service have not done much to encourage me to use
the phone either.

E-mail is usually fine, if not preferable, among my tech-savvy friends, but I am realizing that it's very limiting to define one's friends in terms of how willing someone is to e-mail you. Masonic communications aside, I'm getting in touch with other acquaintances via telephone, too. Yesterday I ran into my friend L., a fiddler and luthier that I used to play with most every week at a nearby old-time session. I never got to know him very well outside those sessions, and when that session got cancelled by the host venue last fall I fell out of touch with him. When I bumped into him, he seemed to be in a bit of a hurry (as was I) and we didn't really have much of a conversation. I felt badly afterward, and so today I resolved to call him up and try to re-establish that connection. I had to leave him a voice-mail, but that's OK. I hope to talk to him soon.

L. is the perfect example of the sort of person I should really call instead of e-mail; he has an e-mail address and checks it regularly I'm sure, but I get the impression it's an auxiliary mode of communication for him. And of course these days you never know if your message is going into someone's spam folder... and if it does, you never know if they even know about their spam folder.

So yes, as strange as it sounds I would call getting re-acquainted with the telephone self-improvement... and me not even an Entered Apprentice yet.