Some autistic people find making phone calls extremely stressful and unpleasant and will avoid them at all costs.
Please don’t try and force your communication preferences on others.
image: https://shreyadoodles.com
#ActuallyAutistic #AuDHD @actuallyautistic
On top of that...
I was a child of the 90s, when phone calls cost per minute. My parents would tell me to hurry with my phone call to grandma, because it cost MONEY! That added anxiety I never got over.
Wow a forgotten memory!
@MichaleKFreeman @autism101 @actuallyautistic
there are those autistic folk who don't mind or even enjoy using the telephone and are also fascinated by how it works, some become telecoms engineers (I am one of them 😉 ) - maybe your nephew might become one as well..
I don't mind using email or Signal instead if someone else prefers it, (or SMS but it is less popular for me because I can't easily type it on the laptop)
Oooh, like those transparent telephones when I was a teenager, so you could see all the wires and stuff. Those were cool.
😆 Yes. I want to see how it works, but would rather not actually use it.
@autism101 @actuallyautistic This is me. Many doctors, therapists and public offices can *only* be contacted via phone 😓
Takes me often days, weeks or even months to do a phone call.
It's okay when someone calls me, even though I'd always prefer written communication.
@enby_of_the_apocalypse @autism101 so many services are close to inaccessible for many people 😓
If they answered to texts, it would go like this:
"You can call us any time! ❤️"
"Well, no, actually I can't. Could I send an email?"
"We are happy to help you directly via phone 🥰"
"This is hard for me. See, this is my problem : *explains problem in detail* Can you help me?"
"This is a real problem. It's best to handle it directly. Call me anytime, I'll be happy to help 😚"
"Please... 😢"
"😄"
@autism101 @actuallyautistic Latest example:
I need a minor surgery. Have talked about it with my doc. Need to contact hospital. Have thought about it for months. Now I checked out their website, found the department and were pleased they offered an email address 🤩
Sent an email, explained situation and asked for information. Their reply: "Please call us. Thank you!"
Why, just why? Why don't they have an FAQ sheet and some general info they can send?
😓
I think some people cannot think about what they should say unless someone else asks a bunch of questions, live.
Not sure if that's the case here.
And about email being *always* better. In theory, yes. In practice, it depends on the person at the other end. I ended up ditching Johns Hopkins and going to UMMC for my stem cell transplant (cancer treatment) because the people responsible for handling my emails lied to me about not receiving my emails. 
@yourautisticlife @autism101 @actuallyautistic So sorry to hear about people lying to you not receiving your mails while you were going through such hard times 😔
Interesting what you said about ppl needing to hear specific questions live.
As the summer break (school) has already been 4.5 weeks I'm currently high in spoons and managed to call them. The info I got was so basic that they could have put it on their website. Writing it down for me would've taken ~2min (less than the call) 🤷
They did not realize that I'd be able to read through the lies. They were insisting that the emails were just not delivered. Here's the deal, and the bit that they did not know: I've managed an email server for a long time. It is true that in theory an email could not be delivered, and you wouldn't know about it. However, a correctly configured email server will tell the sender that the email they were trying to send was not delivered. (You get a message from the mail daemon telling you that it was not delivered, for such and such reason.)
(The "you" in what follows is the doctor in question.)
Conclusion: when you tell me that the emails were not delivered and that I did not get an error on my end, you are implying that the people responsible for email servers at Johns Hopkins don't know how to configure a server correctly.
What's more plausible? That you are lying to me, or that the engineers at Johns Hopkins are unable to find their own rear end with both hands?
I'm going to bet on the engineers, and against you.
And it was not just one email they were ignoring but multiple. No one else at Johns Hopkins was ignoring my emails. So... again... what's more plausible?
Ugh how annoying 😓
I guess people just assume you know they're talking BS, but as a decent member of society you will avoid any confrontation and not call them out on their BS. Seems to be some unwritten rule.
@Sci_Fi_FanGirl @yourautisticlife @autism101
What happens to me a lot is that the messages are delivered but automatically classified as spam (for whatever reason -- typically because my homegrown server isn't on their server's greenlist) -- so unless the receiver knows to look in their spam folder, they think they never received it.
@yourautisticlife @Sci_Fi_FanGirl @autism101
In that case -- yeah, very sus. Unclear whether it's a tech issue or a factual accuracy issue, but if they're not treating it as a serious problem I'd tend to suspect the latter.
Yeah, and I did not mention that some of my emails went through just fine, but some important one did not. At first, I was thinking that maybe their spam filter drifted (it sure happens to mine), but since my mail was nowhere to be found and that I did not have the issue with anyone else at Johns Hopkins... hmm.... 
@SalemsLot I would love that for you, although my experience where I'm at is once it becomes automated, everyone has to use *that* system. Plenty of places near me where the attitude is "well, we have the app now, so you don't need a person to book an appointment" and I'm like, look, I don't understand the layout of your UI and I just need help being guided through your processes that you think are 'intuitive' please give me a thinking human who is allowed to troubleshoot 😅
The only right answer is both, but ofc a lot of the money people see that as paying twice for the same thing.
@JustusWingert
> you get used to ups and downs when you start as a freelancer in
... hot air ballooning ...
@JustusWingert @dcrooks @miaoue @autism101 @actuallyautistic
I read of a service (in Germany) that does that "translation" manually.
The problem with automating this is likely: You need to parse what people on the other end say. In a slightly more reliable way than... ChatGPT, for example.
One way would be the very passive-agressive way:
"I am making an appointment for . Please tell me date first, then time."
"Did you say: ? If so, please say 'yes'."
That would be very annoying (which maybe might even lead companies to implement proper ways of making appointments, reservations, etc.).
@JustusWingert @dcrooks @miaoue @autism101 @actuallyautistic
A while ago, I had a related idea, which I called "AutoTroll" for a reason. And it was more of a thought experiment.
It was intended for companies or people who almost never answer their phones or who need fifty reminders to provide a simple piece of information.
You would specify what you want (e.g. a list of several documents you need) and the program would start to pester the recipient over mail, phone and instant messengers, over time increasing frequency.
For example, if someone had so send you a document, the program would check if a reply mail contained a document, otherwise just continue sending mails, maybe more clearly stating what was expected.
This could be a "predatory" business concept, because AutoTroll could also be used to handle those "attacks".
So it would make sense for every recipient to buy one themself, finally leading to a cooperating network of software that handles tasks gracefully.
To make using TRS as simple as possible, you can simply dial 711 to be automatically connected to a TRS operator. It's fast, functional and free. Dialing 711, both voice and TRS users can initiate a call from any telephone, anywhere in the United States, without having to remember and dial a seven or ten-digit access number.
@JustusWingert @dcrooks @miaoue @autism101 @actuallyautistic
The difference to my past idea:
The software handles the whole interaction for you.
Which would be a huge benefit for when my concentration is so bad that calls don't work independent of the actual medium.
TTSPhone makes it easy to have a conversation with someone over the phone using text to speech. The "common words & phrases" feature makes it simple to carry on a conversation with minimum delay. * Choose from a wide variety of voices in any language. * Customize voice pitch and speed. * Customize…
@JustusWingert @dcrooks @miaoue @autism101 @actuallyautistic
"Our service is like polling: No call-backs, no listeners, you read your messages when you want it."
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