In the age of cell phones - is the old adage of 4am calls a dying thing?
Speaking for myself I can remember when that was a thing and now that you mention it, it’s no longer a thing because my phone is on silent all the time.
What’s counterintuitive is that in the age of instant access to everyone, always connected living, it’s significantly more difficult to get my attention at 4am than it used to be.
Yes but I don't know how interesting it is, it will soon be forgotten.
Basically I see a lot of observations like this, where people reminisce how things "used to be" based on the technological limitations of first gen tech. One guy was complaining on my Facebook about how the battery went dead on his car remote and he misses the day when you could start the car with a physical key. Well, from a UX perspective, the key was never intrinsically desired. What is actually desired is that "only authorized users can access the car and start the engine, and without any delay in doing so". Unfortunately for him, his new car didn't have as expensive of tech as mine. In my Lexus even if the battery is completely dead, you can hold the key fob close to the steering column and it can still read the chip. The ultimate version of the technology will have no flaws or caveats and just always work for authorized users without them needing to remember to carry an object or have batteries.
So yeah the first versions of phones had terrible UX, they sounded when the owner shouldn't have been disturbed. But what we must remember is that this state of affairs should have never come to exist in the first place. It's just at the time, no one knew how to remedy it.
This type of thing will soon be forgotten except for an obscure reference in history books explaining why some time period story makes sense (why the father got enraged at being woken up). Meanwhile, until then, bringing it up in conversation will be a good way to signal to young people that you are "really, really old". It is barely a blip no the radar once humans have had phones for 1000 years.
Good response and cool feature on the Lexus! Every problem is the result of a previous solution.
What I’m curious about here is the fact that I can’t be woken up at 4am now. It’s an interesting artifact that I kinda see as a missing feature. Do I want to wake up at 4am for the right call, yes. But unless I’m missing something the caller priority can’t override my default silent mode. Before now, we trusted known and sometimes unknown people to not call at 4am unless it was critical, now I can’t do that. Maybe the unknown people broke the social contract for known callers but I kinda miss it. As my kids age, I kinda feel like I’ll need it at some point.
I distinctly remember in the 90s thinking there should be a voice prompt for a password to incoming callers after a certain hour heh
This actually has been solved on my phone at least, there is an option that it will ring through on silent if the caller attempts multiple times within a certain interval. This will result in you being 15 mins late to the emergency, but is pretty much guaranteed to work since in any big enough disaster they're sure to try multiple times. :)
I think the phone should just explain to the person "press 1 to override silence", then you could enable it for known callers only.
In the age of cell phones - is the old adage of 4am calls a dying thing?
Speaking for myself I can remember when that was a thing and now that you mention it, it’s no longer a thing because my phone is on silent all the time.
What’s counterintuitive is that in the age of instant access to everyone, always connected living, it’s significantly more difficult to get my attention at 4am than it used to be.
Same for everyone else?