I've found more and more often the last few years that a lot of the long time businesses I use still do most of their ordering by phone. Or some version that involves talking to actual person.

The restaurants I go to still generally do phone ordering because they care about the quality of their ingredients. They want to discuss and talk about it with someone before placing an order.

The engineering and consulting firms I work with are the same. The engineers I enjoy working with are all phone based, not a lot of emails unless there are details involved.

I'm a bit of the same way. There is a lot of peripheral information that we miss out on when everything is done via automation/email. Those dead moments when our brains wander, then we ask a silly question, tend to bear fruit.

It's gotten to the point where I generally don't order anything online anymore because I can't trust I'll get what I ordered. When I have to deal with support it's an automated system that only gives me 1 or 2 options, neither of which satisfy my needs so I have to make a compromise. I'm not interested.

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leonhard 14 hours ago | parent [-]

can you elaborate on the phone basis with engineers? I can’t really imagine how that wouldn’t be much more hassle discussing details without written documents, so I’m intrigued

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h3half 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The way NASA did it for decades was conference calls. Nowadays it's Teams meetings.

The outputs of the meetings are decisions that are later encoded in very many very long documents. It's just faster to hash out engineering details when the relevant engineers are able to talk to each other in real time and relevant decision makers are present to be able to unofficially bless or reject what the engineers come up with (formal acceptance of these decisions is of course a paperwork thing).

So, in this domain anyway, it's not a literal phone call. But it's what we see as the modern equivalent.

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array_key_first 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You do both, but I know at work for me the problem with written communication is we just talk past each other. Writing is, still, a very distilled and compressed medium. Meaning, a lot of the information is lost when translated to writing. I've spent weeks talking over email and on ticket just to solve it within 5 minutes on a zoom call.

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fylo 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A picture paints a thousand words

	▲	somat 12 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		A picture is worth a thousand words -- but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of a thousand words can be adequately described with pictures.
	▲	twarge 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		A word is worth a thousand pictures. — Jobs ?