#calling congress

[codeman38]

More phone anxiety rambling, because I still haven't managed to get over mine quite yet. (I actually did come very close to making a relay call yesterday evening, but it was already after hours and I wasn't sure how effective leaving a message would be for something that was the next morning.)

The main thing that frustrates me so much about so much of the advice that I keep seeing shared on Twitter and Tumblr is that phone anxiety is absolutely not a "one size fits all" thing, and most of the advice that I've seen treats it as though it was. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least five different things that might contribute to phone anxiety (and, to be honest, I have a bit of each of these---which is probably why things have been so insurmountable for me). Each of these requires a different set of strategies and information to deal with, and in some cases, what helps with one type of anxiety may make another type worse:

Anxiety about how to express your opinion on the issue at hand. With this type of anxiety, all that's really needed is a script for the "meat" of the call; with that in place, the rest of the call will mostly fall into place by itself. This is all that's covered in a large majority of the guides that I've seen out there, and for this specific subtype of phone anxiety, it's great; however, for anyone with the other types, it's incomplete at best and useless at worst.

Anxiety about social etiquette for the rest of the call. What exactly are you supposed to respond when the person on the other end has acknowledged your message? How do you close the conversation before hanging up? How much information about yourself do you need to give at the start? These things may come naturally to people who regularly make phone calls, but they're not obvious at all for people without much experience in that department.

Anxiety about misspeaking or being misheard. If you have a tendency to stumble over your words, or if you have a speech impairment, there's the possibility you might misspeak or be misheard as saying something completely different than what you intended to say, even if you are reading from a script. Leaving a message may be even scarier than talking to a real person in this case, because there's no opportunity for the other person to clarify.

Anxiety about how the other person might respond. If you're criticizing the politician's stance on an issue, what kinds of things is the receptionist likely to say back? For people who are accustomed to being argued with when expressing any kind of remotely critical opinion of something, this will be a perfectly reasonable fear, and a script that only includes one side of the conversation doesn't even begin to cover it.

Anxiety about misunderstanding the other person. If you have trouble hearing over the phone, and the receptionist asks you for more information or tells you more about the representative's stance, it may take several repetitions before you know what they're saying. How well do the receptionists generally deal with this? What else can you do to clarify things, if you still can't understand the question after several tries? If this has frequently been a source of frustration for people you've called in the past, you may very well be afraid to try again.

[codeman38]

I really want to start calling my senators and representatives about various things, but it just seems so utterly daunting, the kind of thing that would completely drain me of energy for an hour afterward. And it frustrates me that basically everything I've seen online seems to concur that phone calls are given significantly more consideration than emails or tweets. (Handwritten letters are an exception—but with the speed at which this administration is moving, waiting several days for delivery could potentially be too long of a delay.)

And it's because the entire process is basically a pile-up of things that have led to embarrassment for me in the past.

First, there’s the possibility that I'll have trouble understanding the receptionist over the phone. Because of my auditory processing issues, this has happened more often than I would like when calling businesses or interviewers. (Seriously, there are people I know in person whom I can understand with no trouble face-to-face, but whose voices give me all kinds of difficulty when squeezed through a phone line. It's only worse when it's a voice I'm not already accustomed to.)

Then, there’s the possibility that I may stumble over my words, even when reading from a script, because just making the call in the first place already has me stressed out so much. This is almost certainly going to happen if I'm not reading from a script; however, it rarely happens when I am following a script (even if it does come out sounding somewhat robotic and over-prepared).

And last---I've seen maybe one or two posts total that explain what's supposed to happen after you say the scripted thing, and this is what gives me the most anxiety by far. Part of this is tied into the first point: if I'm having difficulty hearing the person's voice, I'll probably be making awkward pauses or asking for repetition as I strain to understand what's been asked. But even if the voice on the other end is completely clear, and even if the question is something that I really do know the answer to, there's still the "off script" issue: I may end up stumbling over my own words as I try to answer, or even completely blank out from stress and forget the answer to a question that I definitely know how to answer.

Has anyone reading this actually tried calling their congresspeople? What does the call usually go like, from beginning to the end? What kinds of things get asked, so that I can prepare scripts for the most common possibilities?

(I'd love to see some kind of flow chart showing the most common things that could potentially be asked at any given point. That would be amazing if someone who has enough experience could compile such a thing.)

I suppose as a worst case scenario, I could just wait until after hours and leave a voice mail. But that has its own anxiety-inducing thing for me: I'm always afraid that my connection glitched out in mid-message, that I had the microphone in the wrong place, or that I wasn't speaking loudly/clearly enough to be heard. (Yes, I'm seriously that bad at phone calls.) For anyone who's left a voice mail for congress, does their system allow you to listen back to your message after recording it? If so, that would solve that particular anxiety point for me---I love when voice mail systems have that option.

[codeman38]

Found a really good Twitter thread from last November by Bogi Takács (@bogiperson) on how phone anxiety can be completely rational for some people. This is exactly why so much of the advice that I've seen for phone anxiety has been frustrating for me: it assumes that phone calls to businesses typically go OK, but for some of us, they do frequently end in communication failures.

(Click through on any of the posts below to see it in the context of the full thread. There are also some really good replies in the original thread which are worth checking out.)

this whole "i was afraid of the phone but i made a phone call and it really helped, so should you" makes me realllly uncomfortable, because

— Bogi Takács PERSON (@bogiperson) November 16, 2016

i'm autistic. whenever i try to do various business-related things on the phone, it usually ends up WORSE than without a call. seriously

— Bogi Takács PERSON (@bogiperson) November 16, 2016

i do not think many people understand the distinction between: * social anxiety and/or social phobia * autism + also stuff like being D/deaf

— Bogi Takács PERSON (@bogiperson) November 16, 2016

wrt social anxiety related conditions, one does not necessarily have a RATIONAL fear. the phone is scary but the phone call might go fine.

— Bogi Takács PERSON (@bogiperson) November 16, 2016

wrt autism spectrum conditions, the call might not go fine! indeed it might end up being a disaster more often than not (my experience,sigh)

— Bogi Takács PERSON (@bogiperson) November 16, 2016

so what to do? i always say: do not "look for the most important activist task to do, do that" - this might end up being a disaster.

— Bogi Takács PERSON (@bogiperson) November 16, 2016

go abt it the other way round! what are the things you already know you are GOOD at? consider: how can THAT be used for your activist goals?

— Bogi Takács PERSON (@bogiperson) November 16, 2016

[codeman38]

Another really good thread, from Twitter, with some suggestions on you can get involved in the resistance other than making phone calls:

Here is a thread I will add to cumulatively as they come across my desk of ways to #resist without calling strangers https://t.co/mtBfpoFIHf

— AnnaClutterbuck-Cook (@feministlib) January 31, 2017

Read the whole thread; it's actually got some really useful ideas that I hadn't thought of!

[codeman38]

I think I’ve managed to get myself into some kind of obsessive phone anxiety loop yet again. And it's mostly because of all these calls to action I keep seeing about contacting congresspeople to push back against the current executive-branch train wreck.

And that's because my phone anxiety isn't run-of-the-mill social anxiety; it's directly influenced by auditory processing difficulties. So the hints that I see in these calls to action really aren't made for me, because the potential failures I'm worried about are an entirely different beast.

Here are some kinds of scripts that I would love to see---with many of them helpful not just for calling Congress, but for dealing with phone-based interactions in general:

For calling Congress:

A larger set of examples for how the entire conversation might flow, from start to finish, including what you say and what the other person would say, based on people's actual experiences calling.

I've only seen around four such posts so far [edited to add links: one, two, three, four], and the second of these is more like a brief summary than a full example. This is not even remotely a high enough value of n for me to feel confident enough to make the attempt.

Personal stories from people who called Congress and misheard or had difficulty understanding the person on the other end, how that person reacted, and how they recovered from the situation. (This would help me feel less anxious about embarrassing myself if a call went that way.)

For phone interactions in general:

Scripts for how to politely ask someone to repeat themselves because you can't make out what they're saying.

Scripts for what to say if, after someone has repeated themselves several times, you're still no closer to deciphering what they're saying.

Scripts for what to say if you need to take time to process what someone said, or need to wait for the transcript from the relay service to catch up, before responding. (Awkward silences are awkward.)

(If anyone has seen any posts along these lines, or writes such a post, please link me to them! Reblog, ask, Tumblr message, tweet, whatever. If they look helpful, I'll reblog them here!)

[codeman38]

I’ve been having some ideas this morning, on the topic of getting one’s message out to those in charge. I have no idea how feasible or useful any of these would be, but they would all be comforting for me:

- I know phone calls are still the best way to reach out, but I’d love to see more lists showing other ways you can help out, in order of their general effectiveness. Not even just for directly reaching Congress, though that’s important too; also ways that you can help others who are trying to reach out, things you can do on social media, etc.

- Something that would make calling easier for me is if there were some way that the idea behind pair programming could be applied to it. Basically, have some way for two people to team up, one who’s good at phone calls and the other who’s less so, and call together. (Not even in person, necessarily; this could be done with conference calling and a simultaneous instant message.) That way, the more capable person can help say things if the other person gets too flustered, or can type things out in the IM if the other person had trouble making out what was said.

[codeman38]

The thought of making a phone call to a congressperson unaided, even with a script for what I'm supposed to say: Anxiety that I may misunderstand some key words and give a completely out-of-left-field answer, potentially rendering the call worthless if the question was for necessary contact information, or leading to embarrassment if I mishear their stance on the issue and respond accordingly. Worry that I may struggle to understand what the receptionist is asking, even after asking themselves to repeat themselves several times, before finally giving up because I have no idea where to even go from there.

The thought of making the same call through a relay service captioner: Still a fair amount of anxiety, but for slightly different reasons. I can finally get interpretations for the muffled words that give me difficulty, but they only appear after a delay of several seconds, so I either respond immediately and make the same mistakes as in the first case, or sit in awkward silences punctuated by "are you there?"s and "hello?"s while I wait to confirm what I've heard. So, somewhat better than the unaided call, but still an uncomfortable, stress-inducing experience.

The same, but after having been given some additional tips, from someone who's actually used the relay service to call Congress, about whether I should identify from the start as someone with hearing difficulties and how to fill time while waiting for the captions to show up: still a bit of general social anxiety, and I'll still probably need to write out the details of what I'm going to say, but this actually seems like something I could potentially do now.

(As an aside: yes, I often need to take a bit of time to make sense of what someone's said to me in person, too. In that case, I usually indicate that I'm still puzzling things out by making some kind of pensive-looking facial expression. This strategy does not transfer very well over the phone, for fairly obvious reasons, which is why I needed a different one...)

This is exactly what I was getting at with my post about how so many phone-anxiety tips aren't helpful for me. My phone anxiety really is an entirely different creature than that of people who have mostly normal auditory comprehension, and I need an entirely different arsenal to slay it. And for the sake of others in similar circumstances, I wish it were easier to find such a set of tools.

[codeman38]

But seriously, people who don't have phone anxiety don't understand the fear of absent-mindedly saying "thanks, bye!" and hanging up on the call when asked for your address after reading your scripted remarks. And based on some of what I've been reading, that's the kind of mistake that actually *could* cause a message to get ignored when calling a congressional representative (because of the whole "checking if actually a constituent" thing). Or alternatively, being so stressed by the call that, even though you did for once manage to hear the question correctly, your mind completely blanks out and you forget your address or zip code or phone number or whatever was asked. And you forgot to write them down as part of your script.