The Telephone – Potential Family Ba

The Telephone – Potential Family Battleground
Hello, everyone. In today’s talk I’m going to give you some pieces of advice on how to use the telephone in the most decent way so as to avoid unnecessary disagreements between you and members of your family.
The telephone, as you know, is a marvelous instrument, but it may cause arguments between you and your parents – arguments that could be easily avoided if you would sit down, talk it over, and agree to a few simple regulations.
The most obvious problem, of course, is what everyone considers a reasonable length of time for a call. The exact duration must be worked out with your parents, but ten minutes should be an absolute maximum. That’s certainly long enough to say almost anything in five different ways, and yet it isn’t so long that other members of the family will become angry. Even when your parents are out, the length of your call should be limited, because they, or someone else, may be trying to reach your home for a very important reason.
Calling hours should be agreed upon. If your parents object to your leaving the dinner table to take calls, tell your friends to avoid calling that hour; if someone does phone, ask him to call back, or offer to call him when dinner’s over.
A serious calling problem is calling very late at night, or very early in the morning. This particular mistake is made mostly by young people who consider 10 or 11 p.m., when a lot of tired adults are happily sleeping, the shank of the evening. So please tell your friends not to call after ten o’clock. The shock of waking out of a sound sleep and the fright of that instant thought – “There’s an accident” - are enough to give your parents a heart attack. Weekend morning calls aren’t startling, but it’s the one time your parents can sleep late.
If your mother and father out of kindness, have installed a separate phone for you, remember that you’re still a member of a family. So try to stick to your family’s regulations.
That’s all for my talk today. Thank you for listening.