April 12, 2008

The Annoyance

How do you simultaneously pay insufficient attention to a person yet manage to be an utter annoyance?

I have a problem with annoying those that are close to me. I call at odd times (early in the morning/late at night), want to talk when it is inconvenient (such as when sitting down to dinner), offer unsolicited advice, freak out when I am unable to reach a person for any extended period of time (over 36 hours or so), and am generally an annoyance to anyone who is unlucky enough to have given me their phone number.

I overcompensate. After over-extending a friend’s patience and good will, I then make every effort not to call. I understand what I am doing when “overstaying my welcome on the phone,” but I have a hard time deciding what are and are not appropriate times and frequencies for calls.

I want to just drop my phone contract altogether but realize the necessity of it. Unfortunately, it leaves me in a situation where I cannot win. After weeks of not calling, a call at some ridiculous time is certainly not welcome. As you grow apart from a person, their tolerance for such things drops dramatically. Additionally, as you overstay your welcome/time requested on the phone, tolerance dramatically decreases.

The answer, of course, is to call with a frequency great enough to remind a person that he/she is important to you but to not annoy. I am incapable of this. In fact, I manage to squeeze both in. I’ll wait too long between calls, and then call multiple times in rapid succession (as if though whatever it is that is going on my life somehow is so important that I need to attempt to call 8 times in one day, using all 3 contact numbers that I have for you each of the 8 times) or at some ridiculous hour of the day.

Because I seem to lack the discretion to make this call on my own, I suppose that I am doomed to continue my path for the foreseeable future. Woohoo!

Grrr, Allen