Mysterious phone habits.. Solved!

There are some puzzling Israeli phone habits that we've noticed over the past two years, though I think we're finally starting to unravel their source. And no, we're not talking about the Israeli habit of always answering their cell phones no matter where they are or what they are in the middle of. I've often called someone only to be told that they can't talk now. If they can't talk, why did they pick up the phone?

One of the first things I noticed is that Israelis never program outgoing phone messages. You know, the part where the voice mail says "Hi, you've reached Aaron. Please leave a message and I'll call you when I'm done watching the Patriots win another football game." or that type of thing. Most times I call people, the voice mail says in a computerized voice, "Hi, you've reached the voice mail of 052-555-5555, please leave a message at the tone." In college, outgoing messages were somewhat of an art form, but no one here ever seems to bother to record one.

Which led me to observation two: Israelis don't leave messages. It took us a very long time to realize that Israelis expected us to call them back when they called and didn't leave a message. They were always surprised when we didn't return those calls. Our attitude was that if they didn't leave a message, they didn't want a call back. But the Israelis never left messages and always expected a call back and got angry about it. This is sometimes frustrating because the phone only captures the phone number about 80% of the time, so people expect a phone call back when we can't actually call them.

Debra was talking to a British friend of hers the other day about this very subject when her friend suddenly exclaimed "that's why you bloody Americans leave those stupid long messages!" She explained that it costs money to check your messages, so you don't leave a message so the other person doesn't have to check their voicemail, and doesn't get angry at you for costing them money. This is a big difference from the states, where checking voicemail is always free or so close to it that it doesn't matter.

And this explains why Israelis don't record outgoing messages: no one ever listens to them! They just hang up when they the person doesn't answer so they both can save money.

I think leaving a message will be a hard habit to break, but I'm finally understanding this strange cultural habit. And I'm finally starting to return calls of people who don't leave messages, which is just as hard to get used to. In many ways, it's the little things that make one feel like a foreigner, not the big things.