Men The Telephone Time-Wasters

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30896, 1 November 1965, Page 2

Men The Telephone Time-Wasters

Women are not the telephone gossips that men say they are. Men use the telephone more often and spend longer talking into it than women do, according to a recent British survey.

It was a man who made the world’s most expensive call and a man still holds the record for the world's longest telephone conversation of three days.

Women, on the average, make shorter calls than men, are more efficient, more concise, more businesslike and more friendly on the telephone, the survey showed.

The average housewife, who K often chided by her husband for spending too long chatting on the telephone to her friends, usually makes less than four calls a day. Her husband, if he has a phone on his office desk. ' might make and receive up to 50 calls a day. At least 30 per cent of them, business consultants say. will be either too long or unnecessary. And the habit does not end when he leaves work. The world’s most expensive call was made by a man in Budapest, one evening, to his girl-friend in Austria. It cost him £260. Costly Babbling It was a man who was recently taken to court in Scotland for using his employer's telephone to call his fiancee in California. He had been babbling away for an hour at a pound a minute, the court was told. When it comes to nattering on the telephone, wives: learn a great deal from their husbands. This was proved, fairly conclusively when a : team of telephone consultants

stayed at the switchboards of several companies to make recordings of typical calls. Male executives were, on the whole, “terse and unchatty,” but still managed to drag out calls to an average of 12 minutes each. One man wasted 40 minutes telephoning around a factory for a. colleague who was on holiday. Another executive made several calls before he had really decided what to say and most of the people he was ringing had to be telephoned back because he could not find the relevant documents. The consultants found that out of a total of more than 1000 calls, 200 appeared unnecessary and 300 more would not stand close scrutiny. Telephone Manner In many cases the male voices, pleasant enough in normal conversation, lacked i colour, interest and cordiality over the telephone. Men, ! it seemed, had a basic mistrust of the instrument and this was often obvious in their telephone manner. Quite often a man who was ; normally good-natured became irritable once he talked !into the telephone. While calls were being monitored at one firm, a director had a five-minute argument with the receptionist at another company when she told him they did not make the product about which he was inquiring. Another executive petu-

lantly slammed down the receiver on a man who telephoned to say that he could not keep a luncheon appointment.

“There is little doubt that women as a race know how to handle the telephone more efficiently,” a business consultant said. “Their voices are usually warmer and more interesting and in business, at least, they know how to extract the information they require quickly and pleasantly." More Natural Women talked more naturally also. Men in any type of management position seemed to spend so much time dictating phrases like “we beg to advise” and “assuring you of our best attention” that many of their telephone conversations were in the same sort of language, the consultant said.

Women may gossip occasionally on the telephone, but they do continue logically from one topic to another. Men tended to repeat themselves, monitors for the survey found. In one “tapped” conversation, a departmental manager was heard to repeat the same instruction in slightly different terms no less than six times. The conversation, which could have taken about a minute, took seven. There would be plenty of repetition in the world’s longest telephone call, made by a New York businessman to his wife who had left him. It is said to have lasted three days. Switchboard operators broke it off when the wife started snoring. The husband, it seems, was still talking happily. Provincial Press Features.