Dear LPG readers,

I bet that more of us have been down this road than we choose to admit.  

If you never really considered the value of your phone, be it a mobile or a good old-fashioned landline, I bet you have a new respect for it after our recent couple of years of lockdown. Some of us used them for the online visual aspect, but being able to be in touch while locked away on your own kept many a person who lives alone in touch. 

 I often wonder how people caught up in the pre-COVID-19 pandemic survived without one.

But for all that, they can sometimes be annoying. Everyone knows someone they will have problems saying goodbye to once they have picked up the receiver and said hello. I am one of three firm friends, and one, for all the other two’s hints, will never understand that she does this to us. 

She calls us almost daily, and she hardly ever allows me to get a word in edgewise when she is on the phone.  The other thing that we, the other two members of the threesome, agree on is that she has nothing but negative news to share.   Once a telephone call from her gets underway, I know it will go on for ages. If she cannot think of any other people we know who have suffered some obscure mishap that she can talk about, there is plenty of bad stuff happening in the national and international daily news for her to focus on. 

I must admit to sometimes seeing her number on my mobile phone and occasionally letting the phone ring until she gives up.  The truth is that mobile phones allow us to see who is calling before we answer the call, and when I don’t feel up to a long, depressing chat, I let her think I did not hear the phone rather than decline the call.  During calls when I think I can take no more, I have occasionally even gone to the front door and rung the bell so that I can interrupt her monologue with that well-worn phrase, ‘Well, I have to go now. Someone is at my door’.

We, the other two members of the trio, have to agree that she is the sort of friend that we would hate to upset, but the other day, she phoned to tell us that she was pretty ill herself.

For the past week, she has been in the hospital, and we, the other two, have both visited her a couple of times. Still, her phone calls have become even more frequent and challenging, and while I know that we both love her and genuinely wish her better, I can let all the sad tidings pass straight over my head. Still, I know that our third friend is being affected quite severely by the continued blow-by-blow accounts of her treatment.  

In desperation, I looked online for information about ending a conversation successfully. Although many of the solutions suggested are for business phone calls, any long-suffering telephone friend might find an idea or two that they can adopt.  

GM, Lewisham

GM finds a few online suggestions that might help in such a situation…

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