I knew a friend who has phobia with phone, but I can’t figure out if it is really phone phobia or social anxiety disorders.

She has a mobile phone but hardly use it unless she is talking to her boyfriend or close friends. Occasionally, she has to handle work-related calls and fears answering the phone / making phone calls to people she’s not familiar with. From my understanding, she didn’t have any phobia like this when she was younger. In fact, she hoarded the phone line all the time in the past. .. So I don’t think she’s really phone phobia? She wanted to know but not sure who to ask. And I’m pretty sure I could not give her a good explanation.

For myself, the closest that I could relate to her is, I fear of answering phone calls from unfamiliar numbers. If it was a private number, the caller could forget about me answering his/her call. Because of my bad experiences with prank callers and phone scam-sounding callers from China (I could tell from their accents), I try to avoid picking up such calls. I could safely say that 60% of my phone calls are scams, prank calls or people who are trying to sell me something. It is ridiculously annoying. There was once, I braced myself to answer a call (fearing that I might miss a work call) and it ended up with an Ah Lian sounding sales woman over the phone, who tried to convinced me that I’m her VIP winner and is invited to come down to their latest product launch. So dodgy!

Here’s how my phone conversation with her:
(Sorry this blog does not support style codes, so it’s a little messy when I do this)

Me: Hello.
Sales: Good afternoon, Miss Eunice. I’m xxx from xxx company. Don’t worry, I’m not trying to sell you something… (Eunice’s note: I don’t know why I am a sucker for just listening to her when I could hang up straight away) I’m here to inform you that you are one of the chosen VIP winners who are invited to our product/company launch.
Me: Uh, no thanks. I’m not interested.
Sales: No lah, wait wait. Let me finish first. Don’t reject so fast leh. (Eunice’s note: Seriously, this is the first time I heard such heavy usage of Singlish over the phone for such gimmicks.) You know, you’re very lucky cos only 8 people are chosen. Then you come for our launch and check out the amazing travel packages that we have. We have a lot of free vouchers to give away, for spa, facial, you know women always like to maintain mah.
Me: No. I don’t need these. Don’t waste your time.
Sales: Okay, why you reject me so fast? Can you tell me why?
Me: Cos I know once I go there, you all will start pressurising me to pay for travel packages and I’m not going to do that. So I don’t to waste your time talking to me when you can find someone else with this time.
Sales: Lydat lor… okay lor. Thanks.

1 hour later, I received a call with its first 4-digit that was the same from this woman. I forgot about it and answered the phone again. The woman said a half-hello, sounded awkward and quickly hung up.

After that, I thought these people behind such phone gimmicks are probably getting to the new low for talking so unprofessionally. I think the reason why I continued to talk to her was because of her persistence and her awesome Singlish. I thought it was amusing from an evil perspective. Lol. No offence!

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