Friend keeps sending long voice notes instead of messages

[GirouxSein]

A friend has started sending voice notes for everything. Some of them are 5 minutes long and I often can’t listen straight away. It then feels rude when I reply hours later.
I know it’s probably meant to be more personal, but I find it a bit overwhelming and honestly prefer a normal message I can skim when I’m busy.

It's the worst of everything. If you want to talk to me, do it I am one of the strange people who doesn't mind talking still. If you want to send me a message, do it I don't mind messaging either - I was there or the height of AIM and the others and would chat for hours, to completely strangers occasionally (feels like another life ago).

If you sent me a voice message, I would tell you no matter how close of a friend to stop being silly and never do it again.

I don't do voice notes and neither do any of my friends or family. We either message or have a telephone conversation. None of us will see 60 again.

DD and her friends do them though.

I don't like them. I'll put up with getting them as I know other people do, as long as it isn't constant and they are short. If it's longer than a couple of minutes I'm not listening to it.

Voice notes are annoying if they're not quick little ones, as it's hard to remember what people are saying to reply properly.

I have a friend who topped one off at FORTY TWO minutes once, but tbh I don't see her often and I listened to it while I cooked instead of a podcast 😅 as its hard to find time for a long chat with family life.

However if someone just did constant voice notes that were 5 mins long I'd mot be happy at all, such a pain to listen to and reply properly.

I think they are ignorant, it’s like ‘I want to say something but I don’t want a reply. I’m making a speech, not having a two way conversation’

It was different leaving a voicemail if the person was out, but people are creating these monologues on purpose.

Thank you so much for this!! I have an acquaintance who sends 10+ mins long voice messages and it's just too long. I'd far sooner read a message. I've just tried out the transcribe function and it works brilliantly.

One of the few advantages of being deaf. “I won’t be able to hear that. Please text instead”

I hate them. I'm rarely in a situation where I can listen to them and the main culprits do it when we're sorting out arrangements to meet up.

I usually just text and say can they summarize the main points and I'll call them if need be

If it’s WhatsApp, you can turn out transcript in settings and it will change it to text. I had a friend who does this and make a comment in jest about it being a podcast not a voice note for her to understand it’s too long without feeling too direct

Anything over 20 seconds is a podcast.

Just tell her you'd prefer texts as you don't time to listen to voice notes.

Clearly the odd one here - i like a chatty voice note.

Those things are entirely different activities. There's a time and a place for each one.

I'll be using the Transcript feature from now on (thanks for those who suggested this), because I don't know where to start replying to a rambling voice message. However lovely it is to hear from the sender.

text messages are good for "please pick up some milk" nothing more. We lost a huge amount of tone, empathy and meaning when we stopped making phone calls. VMs are by far a better medium than text..

However. You could ask your friend to keep them shorter, under a minute

And - never feel pressured to reply in a timely way. You shouldn't;t be checking and responding to messages all day long anyway, thats bad for your own mental health and attention span.

My sil does this it drives me insane. I stopped listening to them a while back. I don't have a time to sit there listening to her ramble on about random shit when a one sentence text reply would do.

it's worse than receiving a phone call

I love voice notes too! It's chatting but being able to do other jobs too. I don't use it often and only with a couple of friends that are far away but I'm really surprised it's so hated. People seem so impatient all the time now.

It just goes to show that if you have stopped listening to them, you missed nothing and the person sending the voice note was just talking shite anyway!

Rowan Atkinson had a good take on this recently. I want to share this with all my voice noting pals

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/17t4qGdsdj/

I absolutely loathe them, so it's wonderful to learn there's a transcribe feature! Did not know that until now.

I actually lost a friend over this. She was a very tricky character anyway, always falling out with friends, when she felt they didn’t live up to her high expectations of friendship.

Anyway, she’d leave multiple long messages, sometimes constant messages for half an hour. And her voice was very quiet, so in order to hear the messages I had to stop what I was doing, go into a quiet room, shut the door, and hold the phone to my ear. Often I had to wait until the house was empty for it to be quiet enough to hear.

She’d then expect immediate well-thought-out replies. And she’d get cross when I didn’t comment on something she’d said, even though I explained that I couldn’t hear the messages. She’d get angry with me for not being able to hear!

A few months ago she stopped contacting me, and I realised I’d been discarded like many other friends. And I don't mind at all. It was so stressful getting all those messages!

I absolutely love them. I'm really happy with my phone pings with a half-hour rambling message from my best mate. We live far away from one another and it feels like we're still part of one another's lives in a very real and close way.

Speak for yourself. I hate phone calls mostly. If I want to talk to someone I arrange to meet them, or if I can’t I message through whatsapp or FB messenger.
But then as most of my phone calls these days are from elderly DPs with an issue or medical professionals/carers/other people ringing about elderly DPs, I am mildly traumatised every time the phone rings and yes I hate voice notes thank goodness none of my friends do them.

This made me laugh!

My parents both used to do exactly the same; the big sigh... "I hate talking to a bloody machine" - well, don't then!!

Thankyou!!

I could never articulate exactly why I find voice notes so irritating...