To say if you have something to ask me don’t demand a phone call?

[ScullyD]

I’m wondering if this is a generational thing. Im a millennial, my dad’s in his 60s.

Today I submitted my thesis, I’m a mature student in early 30s. I’ve spent most of the day napping and I’m really exhausted. The last year has been very intense.

anyway I had a missed call from my dad tonight then he messaged and said ‘can you call me please, I want to ask you something.’ AIBU to think if you have something to ask then ask in a message? Obviously I’m frazzled having just finished a thesis and I don’t want to call anyone. Plus I have to work tomorrow. AIBU to find this very annoying?

I don't see the issue with this. Anyway, surely you wouldnt want him to text you if he did in fact have cancer or something.

Absolutely agree with this. Bloody
madness you couldn’t just give him a quick call

Oh do fuck off. It's always people who find phone calls exhausting who have to suck it up. Why doesn't op's father suck it up and type the question he want to ask her in message? It would take him as much time as typing "call me, I have to ask you something" did.

I think you need to chill out a bit. Submitting your thesis really shouldn't be this taxing.

Just put him on loud speaker, give the odd grunt, and scroll away on mumsnet. It's what I do with my mother!

My siblings are fuckers for this.

They're always moaning at me saying I never answer the phone. My response is "and yet you keep trying."

99.99% of what they have to say is textable. I have spent years telling them that if they want to tell me something, they can text it. For some reason. It falls on deaf ears. They're all older than me. (Youngest is 50s). I don't know if it's generational but It's Easier To Phoners are the scourge of the planet!

I do, however, always answer the phone to my elderly parents so that probably doesn't help you. Congratulations on the thesis!

Ah, but it's only efficient if you both want to have the conversation at the same time.

And tbh, I find it unlikely that people are "efficient" in speech but not in writing.

I adapt to my colleagues, and try to engage with people in their preferred medium. But I have a 65yo colleague who will drop a "quick call" on me and launch straight into extensive detail about something when I've been working on something else.

I much prefer to schedule calls with a couple of bullet points first in mind so I can get in the right subject.

Your dad wants to talk to you and you don't want to talk to him. It's not really about anyone being reasonable. Either call him or text to say you can't speak today and can he message you instead. Why the drama?

You are being utterly unreasonable op. If you don’t want to answer your phone, don’t, but your father is doing nothing wrong asking you to call him back (unless there is some huge backstory, in which case yabu not to mention that. Grow up.

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“Can you call me, please” is a request, NOT a demand. Get a grip and stop being dramatic and offended by perfectly ordinary communications by people who give a damn about you.

I had an inkling that that might be the case - there's so much undiagnosed illness, low level health issues and neurodiversity about on top of all the stuff that's actually diagnosed but that people don't think to mention because it doesn't sound relevant. And that other people often don't understand. But good for you for making the call! Hope it wasn't too painful!

Incidentally, I came across this blurb on an ADHD Facebook page and it does a good job of breaking down why phone calls are so unpleasant for some people with ADHD (I've heard it's very similar for many people with autism and other ND) and are also such a time sink - you don't just lose the time on the call - you lose the time you need to spend trying to psych yourself up into going through with it which can be many times longer than the call itself and is very unpleasant in and of itself. And then you often need to factor in a lot of recovery time afterwards for your nervous system to get back to normal too. So while it might "just" be a quick call to the other person it isn't necessarily to the ND/health compromised person. I haven't checked to see if this has actually been confirmed by researchers but it describes my experience to some degree (well, it's a much milder version of what I experience but have other conditions on top of the ADHD which compound the stress - and the advice at the bottom doesn't help, only not talking on the phone helps!).

You need to call the doctor. Urgent. Medication refill. You pick up the phone. Heart racing. Finger hovering. Can’t press it. “I’ll do it in 5 minutes.” Two hours later, still haven’t called. No medication. But you still can’t do it. Everyone says: “It’s just a phone call.” But here’s what researchers discovered: ADHD brains process phone calls as threats. Not because you’re socially anxious. Because phone calls require four executive functions simultaneously: Working memory to track conversation without visual cues. Real-time processing with no pause button. Managing unpredictability you can’t prepare for. Performance pressure with no edit or delete. Neurotypical brains handle this automatically. ADHD brains get overwhelmed before the call starts. Your nervous system treats the phone as danger. And triggers the same freeze response. This is why you can text easily but can’t call. Talk in person but phone feels impossible. Avoid urgent calls even with severe consequences. It’s not laziness. It’s executive function overload triggering threat response. What helps: Script it first. Body double on silent call. Set exact timer. Do it while scared. If phone call paralysis is costing you medical care and job opportunities, check my profile bio for systems that work with your ADHD brain. phoneanxiety, ADHDparalysis, executivedysfunction, neurodivergent, adhdwomen

Yes, some things in life are a pain. They are exhausting, they are difficult, they are not something we want to do or enjoy.

But…. We do them anyway.

It is life. Ups and downs. Ebbs and flows. Good with bad.

And even if you do have a ND that means a quick call to your dad “exhausts” you…. Grit your teeth.

It is like quite a few things in life. I am going to pick up my teen from a sporting event tonight because trains are messed up. It’s a 3 hour round journey. I won’t get home until gone midnight. And I have to be up at 5.30am to walk the dog before heading in to work. All I want to do is curl up in bed with Netflix. But for others.. I’m going to temporarily “exhaust” myself

My son has ADHD. I know that keeping his room clean and tidy takes genuine monumental effort. However he doesn’t just accept he’s going to live in squalor. He forces himself to do the minimum to keep me happy. Even though I do appreciate it genuinely does exhaust him. So he does it.

“Hi Dad, I can’t talk right now. Is it super urgent? You can drop me a text or we can chat at lunchtime tomorrow”

@KimMumsnet maybe give OP a call to chat about it 😂

When I say it exhausts me I don't mean it like you mean it though. Exhaustion for people like you is feeling bone tired and possibly more than a little grumpy, yet still managing to go to work the next day, then coming home and being able to interact with and care for your children. For me it means a loss of functionality at the most basic of levels as the energy to do very simple tasks has been completely depleted (and never having had the energy to have a full time job or kids in the first place, let alone both at once).

A phone call that goes on even slightly too long probably means that I won't be able to speak to my partner for the rest of the night - just nod or shake my head, and I won't manage the shower I was planning. If the call goes on for far longer than expected (some phoners are shit with boundaries so this used to happen a lot no matter how firmly I tried to set them), I might still be unable to speak the next day and may have to cancel plans. Or if I can speak the next day, I will have to ration my words, answer yes or no when I want to talk in full sentences to my partner etc. I very rarely answer the phone because of this but I have on occasion been caught out. It's not your neurotypical level of exhaustion and it's not just "a pain" for me like it is for you. There is a strong link/overlap between ADHD and ME/CFS for this reason - things that are easy and relatively low-energy activities for you are not easy, low-energy activities for many of us.

While it sounds like the OP is likely living with a much milder version of what I'm living with, she's still allowed to feel irritated and frustrated if she suspects her time and energy are going to be wasted when it could have been avoided. Especially when she has just been relieved of a mammoth task and will want some down time. And when she might expect the person suggesting the phone call to know how she feels about phone calls. We will have to wait and see what the phone call was actually about. Maybe she is worried over nothing and will be shown consideration.

Ultimately though, a disability is not something that can be overcome with a better attitude or just expending a bit more effort than the average person would put into something. That might be called a condition, or maybe just an attitude problem. Disability means you cannot do something that most people can do - either absolutely or on any sort of reliable or sustainable basis, or without consequences that are massively disruptive to your life or damaging to your health. Given so many people live with these without having a diagnosis (it sounds like the OP might be in this boat), it can't be a bad thing to at least try to understand that what's easy for one person may not be for someone else even when on the surface they may seem capable of it.

Maybe, he’d like her to take some interest in HIS life too, which is very reasonable. As is, a text saying please, call me. I have a question.” Maybe, he wants to find a way she’d like to celebrate submitting her thesis. I still think a compromise by picking a day soon, texting him to make a plan to call would satisfy him and still give her a few days break.

So did I.

I see MNHQ has addressed it.

Very strange. I thought it wasn't actually possible to do it.

It just seems you have a preference for longer text messaging and not calling in person, and he has a preference for phone calls and only short text messages . It could be a generational thing as many older people prefer to speak on the phone or face to face. I don't think he is being particularly difficult, as he just has different communication preferences but you are too tired at the moment to make what you think might end up a long call . He might just lonely and asking for a chat, hence the message. It's up to you to message back stating a convenient time for a call. His message didn't state he expects an immediate call back.

It doesn't sound like she gets much of a choice about taking an interest in his life -it sounds like she's assigned the role of audience whether she likes it or not, although maybe I've misunderstood. And I think she said she thought it very unlikely he'd take much of an interest in her thesis but with the name changing it's harder to check.

I think a compromise would be sensible if it's definitely going to be a quick and easy call (if there is such a thing for the OP - there isn't really for me), but going by the strength of OP's reaction it sounds like it may not be. I know she hasn't said this about her dad explicitly but my experience of people who try to ask you for phone calls when they know (or should know) you don't like them is that they're not great with boundaries if you actually agree to the call. You're not allowed to end the call after 5 minutes even if they've said it won't take long and they will happily pretend they didn't hear you when you say you have to go now if they still want to talk. And then they continue on for another 40 minutes until you're practically crying with exhaustion meaning you also end up having to cancel your plans for the next day so you can recover and the relationship is damaged further. Nothing good ever comes from "can you call me please" in my experience but maybe I'm projecting! I hope I am OP - I hope your dad is genuinely just after a short call to ask a quick question and will let you go when you say you have to go and that your aversion to the phone is not as extreme as mine! My extreme aversion has come from these experiences to be fair😂

Fair enough.