Communication Breakdown

Why I might not return your call

Our phones at the studio have been giving us trouble. A loud car crash last summer took down several telephone poles nearby and knocked out electricity for the whole block. The resulting surge fried our phone system, which was 10 years old and therefore a relic from another era. Getting it back up and running was no simple feat, but it was significantly less expensive than a brand new $10k phone system.

What price communication?

Since the repair, our phones work as normal… kinda. The big issue is, if I’m on line 1 and another call comes in, instead of going to my voicemail as it used to, now I get a call waiting beep that I can’t answer. When I don’t, the caller simply hears a perpetually ringing line. This is not good.

It happens rarely, though, so I’ve not worried too much about it.

But then it happened twice in the last two days and, along with some other communication challenges, I’m starting to take the problem seriously.

What if the caller at the other end of the line has an arm full of cash and is desperate to give it to me in exchange for photographs? I’m confident this is the case, in one way or another, because I don’t get that many phone calls. And the ones I do get are usually people asking about hiring me.

We’ve got to get this figured out. Whatever the cause, I’m sure the fix will be preposterously expensive. And that’s not even the primary problem.

The prospect with whom I was speaking today when the call waiting beep came through mentioned she’d sent a message via my website contact form. Which puzzled me because I hadn’t received it.

Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve received a website contact form submission in quite some time.

Uh oh.

I hurried to open the backend of the site and take a look at the form. It indexes all messages, so I was able to quickly see this caller’s message at the top of the list, safely stowed with all the other junk in the spam filter.

I retrieved it and groaned, and went back for a closer look.

Ten days ago was another inquiry: “Hi, we’re interested in getting a quote for some corporate photography.”

I groaned louder as I pulled the message into my inbox before continuing my search through the weeds.

Spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam hi we’re looking to book a large production spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam.

Dear god.

There were more. Five inquiries in total, dating back three months, buried in hundreds of spam messages. I never saw any of them.

Losing out on the individual gigs is bad enough. Had I politely declined for some reason — schedule, budget, style — fine. But to flat out ignore them? I can think of little worse. As far as those people are concerned I’m an unserious doofus who doesn’t return calls. A time waster. I hate that.

The bigger picture is even more terrible. What’s the value of a lifetime client? I have customers whose initial small jobs ended up amounting to six figures over time. I worked for a client last month for whom I began shooting in 2005. What if my 2045 client just reached out and I didn’t see it, so now they’re someone else’s best new client?

This pains me greatly. We spend so much time on portfolios and marketing and cold calling and social media and then someone decides to think about hiring you and you ignore them completely. How much worse could it get?

If I need to hire a new assistant — or perhaps I’m trying to expand the crew, or perhaps I’m just wanting to send an interview request to a photographer I’ve found on Instagram — most of the time there’s an email or phone and I can easily get in touch. But every now and then I want to reach out to someone to offer them money in exchange for goods or services and I am unable to do so. I don’t want to slide into your DMs. I don’t want to have to friend you on Snapchat. I just want to call or text or email and say hey are you interested in working with me Friday?

This is boomer behavior, I gather. But you know what? Boomers got paid.

I think they’re right about this. If you’re trying to run a successful business, make it easy for the people with the cash to get in touch the way they want to, right? Lower barriers for entry, that’s my approach. Until such time as you have more work than you need, cast a wide net.

Believe it or not, my recent technological issues have me doubting this approach.

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If the system isn’t perfect — if your emails get blocked as spam (which, believe it or not, also happened to me this week when a key person in an important new project simply wasn’t receiving my emails) — wouldn’t it be preferable to abstain entirely and force people to contact you via a more foolproof method?¹

Yesterday I was awaiting a 2FA text that simply never arrived. Ninety minutes later, my phone dinged. And dinged and dinged, 15 times in total. Some sort of network logjam kept my 2FA codes from arriving, along with a dozen other messages from friends and family that had backed up over the course of 12 hours. What the heck! Now text messages don’t work either?

It’s fitting, since my cell phone doesn’t reliably work as, you know, a telephone.

This isn’t some unc type thing where I don’t know how to turn off Do Not Disturb. Some incoming callers, maybe 20%, simply never ring. They go direct to voicemail, which is delivered typically a few hours later, and our phones never show a missed call.

Ain’t technology grand?

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All of these technologies are of course capable of amazing things. But they’re not perfect. And when things go wrong it’s harder than ever to get them fixed. Verizon blames Apple. Apple blames Verizon. And I have to make an appointment with a genius just to be told I should probably spend $1,200 on a new phone. How can you expect a phone to ring if it’s three years old?

The more that goes wrong with every means of modern communication, the more I think the youths might be onto something. Instead of being convenient to get in touch with via methods that don’t reliably work, they funnel all their contacts into one single means of communication that seems to be reliably foolproof: Instagram DMs.

My cell phone, email, studio phone, website and text messages: 60% of the time, they work every time.

I wrote months ago that I was considering becoming a luddite. I was just blowing off steam, of course. How could a guy reliant on digital cameras and computers and image processing applications ever become a luddite? But since writing that I’ve been attuned to how much high tech stuff simply doesn’t work to a professional standard.

My cell phone drops calls, or won’t push messages, or randomly won’t ring. My outgoing emails get flagged as spam but my inbox is filled with boner pills and Nigerian princes. My car tells me I have a flat tire but what I really have is a faulty tire sensor. I soap up my hands at the public restroom sink and then struggle to convince the motion-activated faucet to believe in my existence. My expensive studio phone can’t find line 2. When I call to try to solve any issue, I am told by a recording that not only is my call very important but they are experiencing higher than normal call volumes. I’m starting to suspect it’s neither higher than normal nor that my call is especially important. And it’s beginning to make me mad.

Being a small business is hard. This easy stuff should be the least of our problems.

When I wrote about being a luddite I was just joshin. But with every passing day I’m more inclined to believe it’s not a bad idea. What exactly is the alternative? I just want the simple stuff to work. Is that too much to ask?

Yes, apparently, it is.

1. I was on the receiving end of this in another way recently. Wearing my hat as writer for Outdoor Photographer, I reached out to someone whose work makes them ideal for a feature in the magazine. Because they have recently released a book, I expected them to respond promptly to my inquiry, so I was surprised when neither my website contact submission nor my email were returned. So I tried again a week later. Still nothing. A week after that, in a last ditch effort to give them a break, I googled their name to see if they had another email on a public profile. Finding their Gmail, I dashed off one last shot. Sure enough, 12 hours later I had a reply. The only reason they got the message was because I was positive they would have responded had they received my message. The moral of the story? If they’d listed a phone number, or an alternate email, or any number of other contact methods on their website, they may not have narrowly escaped a self-promotion catastrophe.