The End of Goodbye
By Thomas Gallant
The common courtesy of ending a conversation with “goodbye” is quickly fading. There are several culprits but the bottom line is that we just don’t seem to give a shit anymore. The relationship of speaking and typing has gone completely upside down and doesn’t seem to be reversing. The main causes for this that I see are:
Dropped Calls
So many of us today use cell phones as our primary means of telephony that a dropped call is something of a regular occurrence*. Sure, it’s easy to pin this on AT&T but every network suffers from it at some level. At the end of the day, dropped calls have basically given us permission to hang up on each other when we’re no longer interested in the conversation. 20% of the time that person will call back and you have to go “oh sorry about that, I’m in a bad service area” whether it’s true or not.
Texting
I got in to texting the way I got in to having sex: gradually, only after a lot of encouragement from a girl I knew that was already pretty good at it. I started out using text messages in loud places where I couldn’t hear a phone call but that was it. Also like sex, do it sparingly or eventually it’s going to cost too much. But times have changed and even the construction guys at the corner deli that used to be faithful Nextel users are now sporting iPhones. Everybody texts and most do it to avoid conversation. Send out 160 characters of information and you get to skip the pleasantries.
Boolean Logic
Life has become a bunch of 1’s and 0’s. Smartphones with bad signals and texting are just derivative side effects to the digital age. Information is everywhere, as is misinformation, and we all seem to be a little too eager to go find more. So much so that we don’t have time for goodbye as we might just miss out on the next ticker to hit the tape, and if that happens we won’t be the first to tweet about it.
The Sopranos
While Journey can thank David Chase for making “Don’t Stop Believing” the top cover band hit of 2007, the show left without saying goodbye. I can see the genius behind the way the show ended, but all in all they basically hung up on us and we accepted it as a dropped call. People even called their cable providers to find out what happened to their signal.
So do the world a favor and finish a conversation once in a while. And no mom, this does not mean you should continue to sign your name at the end of your Facebook comments. In fact, stop commenting altogether.
TG
*I always wanted to use “telephony” in a sentence.
