Hello? Hello?

I have often wondered why I decided I would do fieldwork, knowing that I don’t particularly like talking to strangers. But, now that I’m in West Bengal, trying to interview people in a place where I don’t have many contacts, I am realizing that there is an aspect to fieldwork I dislike even more than talking to strangers: talking to people on the phone.

My best college friend, Michelle from LA, could tell you about how little I like the phone. About how, when we were in college, I would go weeks without checking my voicemail. And about how I still sometimes do that. And about my tendency to not return calls for a long time even after I listen to my messages. And how my phone goes unanswered a suspiciously large percentage of the time. Large enough that, if you didn’t know me, you might start to suspect I was sitting by the phone and letting calls go to voicemail, just because I didn’t want to use the phone. But, since Michelle does know me, she is certain that is what I’m doing.

Now, I’m stuck here making tens of phone calls per day trying to get interviews. I just hate it.

First, there are all kinds of technical oddities with Indian phones—I can’t possibly get into it here, seeing as how the capacity of the internet is finite, but in India you have to dial the numbers differently for cell phones, land lines, long distance land lines, and long distance cell phones. And it has taken ages to master that. And, for whatever reasons, even properly dialed calls get dropped about 25% of the time.

Oh, also, West Bengal has no government phone directly. Full stop. There literally isn’t one, in print or online. In fact, the government of West Bengal website does not list even a single phone number. And, also, so far as I can tell, if you do call the West Bengal seat of government, there is no operator to help you if you don’t know somebody’s extension. The one time I’d like to speak to a person!

When I finally get someone on the line… Well, the next thing I hate is that nobody identifies their office when they pick up the phone. As in “Hello, this is the office of Mr. Singh.” Instead, they just say “Hello” or “Namaskar” or sometimes just “Ji?”—which is a polite form of “yes?” but still seems terribly abrupt to me. I mostly have the rhythm of asking whether I am speaking to such and such an office down, but initially it really threw me. And it is still bad when I’m being transferred. As in:

Me: “May I speak to Mr. Singh?”

Unidentified Voice #1: “Just a moment”

Unidentified Voice #2: “Hello?”

Now, at this point: how am I supposed to know if I’m speaking to Mr. Singh’s secretary or to the man himself? Because, it has gone both ways on me. Which means I’ve talked to secretaries and inappropriately used the second person and to politicians and inappropriately used the third person. I wouldn’t be quite as self-conscious about this were it not for the low quality phone connections. Which mean that when I get someone on the line I antagonize them for the first minute by shouting back and forth about whether we can hear each other. And then I antagonize them by not really having any idea who I’m speaking to. And I go on to antagonize them by not being able to understand about 40% of what they are saying. It doesn’t make me feel confident about asking for favors.

I get two kinds of “no’s” and I’m not sure which one I dislike more. People who have actually said “no” have been, frankly, kind of mean about it. I particularly dislike when someone posts their direct number online and then has this whole “how dare you waste my time?” attitude when I call that number. Because, listen buddy: I know you’re important. I don’t expect you to take your own phone calls. But how am I supposed to know that you’re using some perverse logic wherein your listed numbers are the ones you don’t want people to call?

The other kind of “no” is the handle-my-call-like-a-hot-potato between assistants. With transferring and retransferring, and “why don’t you call back” at this time or on this date. And I don’t really expect people to call me when they say they will, although I can’t help being a little hopeful when they give an actual time and date when they are going to call. Why do people have to embellish when they blow me off? It’s just mean.

What is totally mysterious to me, though, is trying to figure out when “yes” means “no”. In particular, the people who promise to get me meetings with or phone numbers of important people and then disappear. I think it is pretty common to have someone make a promise he does not intend to keep in order to avoid saying “no.” But why would you promise things above and beyond what I even requested? I guess it is about wanting to appear cool. Like telling the other 10^th graders that you have a girlfriend from summer camp...

Which reminds me: once, when I was in 6^th grade, I hung up the phone on someone who had called to ask if I wanted to go out with his friend, Carson. I thought it was a prank and they were making fun of me. It was only in the last few years that it occurred to me that they might have been serious and that, in that case, I may have been a wee bit harsh in my rejection. I believe that my current troubles probably relate to the bad karma I accrued from that early phone misadventure.

When I get back, I think I will get a Blackberry. Then I can enjoy the illusion that I don’t own a phone at all. Evil, evil machines.