Thursday, August 25, 2005
Phone Phobia
There was a “quirk” meme going around last week, which I never got around to participating in. One thing that seemed a common quirk among bloggers was phone phobia. That was one I would have listed. I had trouble thinking of enough other quirks to make a meaningful list. Surely they must be there.
At any rate, the phone phobia thing is very much on my mind at the moment. It has affected our apartment search, which has consisted primarily of spreading the word that we’d be looking, way prematurely as we didn’t have the money yet, in hopes of something especially good landing our way through word of mouth. I’ve only ever landed one apartment through newspaper ads, and that I moved out of after four months without the promised working refrigerator. Entirely apart from the phone thing, I tend not to trust answering ads as a method for finding a place. Odd, as that’s the norm and seems to work for people.
The next apartment, after the aforementioned slum, I found through serendipity, seeing a sign as I drove by. Since I am far less terrified of pulling into a strange driveway, locating the person, asking about and seeing the place on the spot, that was cool. Well, and I didn’t have a phone at the time.
While I’ve been tempted to do some random driving around, looking for rental signs, I decided to try a more logical, organized approach instead of trusting entirely in luck and vibes. Plus it’s a way to combat nervousness. If I simply picked up the phone and started calling with the ads in front of me, I’d forget to ask things and might lose my focus.
So I have the possibilities listed in Excel, with the specs known from the ads or to be determined in neat columns. I figure I won’t miss anything important, and can have that as a focal point. It also organizes the places by their specs at a glance. I have the town, size, price, price plus heat to make a comparison between includeds and not includeds (I’m using the $150 a month average it costs us here, which makes this place $1200, the same as the most expensive prospect, which is a bigger 3 bedroom place), floor, whether there are washer/dryer hookups, etc.
The lowest cost place on the list would save us $300 a month. I’m gunning for the 2 bedroom mobile home, though. That would save us $175, solve the problems that can come of other people being in the same building, and presumably make parking not a problem. We could be genuine trailer trash. I’m wondering if there are any gotchas to that deal.
I’m trying to gather my enthusiasm to counter the phobia. How bad is it? The closer I come to the point of actually having to pick up the phone and make the calls, the more physically sick I feel. Obviously the Effexor isn’t doing its job yet, or this presumably wouldn’t be so bad.
I wonder where the phone phobia comes from for everyone. Mine grew primarily out of doing phone-based tech support. I was one of the smoother customer service oriented people when I picked up the calls, but I thought I would die every time it rang. That was true the whole way through my second support job, except my very first day. The phobia developed during my first support job, which consisted of callbacks rather than live incomings. Less than a year of that and phones were never the same for me again.