Don’t you dare call me without texting first

livemint.com:

For some people, there is nothing more delightful than the surprise ringing of a phone that signals someone is thinking about them. For others, there is nothing ruder, more intrusive or panic-inducing than an unannounced call. You are out of your mind—and possibly not in their life—if you’re not sending them a text first.

Phone-call etiquette has never been more complicated. Family members, co-workers, spouses and friends can’t agree on whether it’s OK to call someone without first alerting them via text that you plan to call. The debate is intensifying: the more entrenched texting has become, the more people have come to find a phone call without warning unacceptable.

Those who call without warning, in turn, find the phone-call-phobic rigid to the point of absurdity: calls aren’t “unannounced"—the ringing is the announcement, with more than 100 years of precedent. “I just don’t think calling is that big of a deal," says Aparna Paul, 41, of North Easton, Mass., director of communications for a nonprofit. She frequently calls friends and family out of the blue.

Once when she needed to get a work task done that required contacting a colleague, she dialed him up without texting or emailing first. “The co-worker was very annoyed that I called him," she says. “Extremely annoyed." Paul is flummoxed by the shift toward some unwritten rule that a phone call must be a planned event: “To me it’s a little bit narcissistic to think your time is so important that I have to pencil myself into your schedule for a two-minute call." Expectations for communicating by phone tend to fall along generational lines, though outliers exist.