A new survey from mobile phone firm GiffGaff has revealed that nine in ten people have made a phone faux pas. I'm not entirely surprised by this revelation, but I'd like to meet the other person who's never done one of the common mistakes listed in the report!
With the decline of landlines, there will be a whole generation who don't remember the heartstopping moment on Going Live! when caller Elliott rang up the show and asked Five Star live on kids' TV why they were so rubbish (but in a less daytime friendly way!). These days, most people don't actually use their mobile phones to make calls at all, and I've written recently about the students who are taking classes in answering phone calls, such is the level of anxiety they trigger in some Generation Z types.
The most common phone errors in reverse order then...
8 - Forgetting to switch to silent mode in a quiet meeting. I was at the cinema last year with my friend Gail, and a woman's phone rang during a quiet moment of the film. As if that wasn't bad enough, she took the call and loudly proclaimed 'I'm at the cinema!'. I thought it was perhaps a Tameside remake of Trigger Happy TV with Dom Joly and his massive mobile phone (which incidentally recently got stolen from a museum in Amsterdam).
7 - Deleting an important message. Pretty convinced I've done this one plenty of times when having a blitz on unread E-mails. I have friends who have got literally thousands sitting unread in their inboxes. I wouldn't be able to sleep! Perhaps that's preferable to going on a deletion blitz though and getting rid of vital stuff.
6 - Sending an incomplete or draft message. Guilty as charged on this one too. I've been writing this column for over four years now, and I always fear a blank expanse of page will appear in the newspaper one week after I've sent it to the editor without any words.
5 - E-mailing without attachment. This has to be something everyone has done too. There should be a function that stops you from sending the message if you've mentioned anything in the body of the text about an attached document. Surely in an age of AI, this would be easy to sort.
4 - Accidentally closing an app during use. I also have friends who have more tabs open than I've had hot dinners (i.e. a lot), and I get a bit too enthusiastic closing tabs down on my phone. It appears I've done every single faux pas on the list so far...
3 - RInging the wrong person. If your first name begins with A like mine, you'll no doubt have had the joys of pocket phone calls and long voicemails offering an out of context snapshot of someone's day for three or four minutes before it cuts off. As nobody makes phone calls these days, I've not had one of those for ages, but it used to be an issue!
2 - Sending a message to the wrong person. My worst example of this is sending a really rude message to a mate of mine called Jonathan, calling him a word I can't use in a family newspaper. Unfortunately, auto complete in Outlook did its sorcery, and the missive ended up going to the News Editor at the radio station where I worked at the time. I tried to recall the message within seconds of realising, but had a face like a dropped pie when I realised he'd already opened it. A sheepish apology quickly followed.
1 - Calling someone accidentally. This is the only one of the eight I don't think I've ever done, as I rarely ring anyone these days. Meeting up with a friend now seems to involve multiple WhatsApp messages, or worse still a WhatsApp group, with notifications pinging at all hours of the day and night before a date can be agreed. It was a lot simpler in my youth...call them on their landline and arrange to meet under the M&S clock in York on Parliament Street. Done. We now have so many ways to communicate, but in many ways we have never been more isolated. With that, I might attempt to revive the lost art of writing a letter to a friend, if only I can find where I put my address book in 1998.
I'll end with two pleas. Stop using speakerphone for calls on the train. Switch your phone OFF In the cinema.
Alex B Cann column - 29th January 2026 the high cost of hitting snooze
Alex Cann's weekly blog - 9th January
