real life

"Hi, leave me a message and I'll call you back and leave you a message"

I have a girlfriend who lives in Brisbane. We never manage to actually speak. Always calling each other at inconvenient times and getting voicemail. We conduct our friendship very effectively this way. So effectively in fact that she noted today (in a message) how lovely it is to just have an entire conversation on voicemail where you don’t have to stop and listen to the other person, you just get to talk about yourself. Uninterrupted. It’s a bit like therapy but shorter and free.
This seems to be a chick thing because men NEVER leave long voicemail messages. Short and sharp. "Mate, it’s me. Call me back."

I like voicemail more than answer machines because voicemail (mostly) doesn’t cut you off and you don’t have to ring back to leave Part Two. And then Three. You can bang away on it for ages. Sometimes I forget whether I’ve actually spoken to a friend in real time for months because we have exchanged plenty of info in monologue form via voicemails. We’re totally up to date with the minutiae of each other’s lives thanks to Vodafone.

Have we become so self-absorbed that we prefer mononologues to actual conversations?