Nowadays phone etiquette goes beyond calls. We have texting, chat apps, and social media platforms just to name a few. Whether you’re being ghosted by a guy you like or are in the middle of a Twitter war, there are some simple “rules” that we forget to follow. Thankfully, Jenny Slate took the time to sit down with Vanity Fair to answer some of our questions about interacting through our mobile phones. We’ve listed the concerns brought up along with Jenny’s most impactful response. She is also repping for her new movie Landline, a film about family and the complications brought up by infidelity.
Go through the list for our key takeaways and watch the full video below for all of Jenny’s thoughts.
On group calling friends only to have one friend eavesdrop on another while inviting another unknowing friend to shit-talk said eavesdropping friend
“That’s for rude people. Don’t do it and if someone does it to you, they’re garbage. No one ever did it to me, they were mean to my face, it was the ’90s.”
On Snapchat
“Let me be honest, I don’t get what Snapchat is and I don’t use it. I thought that it was for people sending pictures of their penises and their vaginas and their tits so I don’t use that because I don’t do that.”
On feeling the need to flood text someone to avoid boredom or loneliness
“For me, I experienced this very deeply. And I feel like there’s a little hole of loneliness inside of myself that for most of my life, I’ve been pulling people in in order to fill it up. And now I realize that what you need to do is plant the seed of yourself deep in your hole and grow up out of it like a tree… Just, like, fill your hole.”
On the importance of saying hello
“I think that it is a fundamental and simple pleasure to greet people. And hopefully we’re not all so disgusting by this point that we just like computer each other all the time.”
On making a collect call
“When I was in high school, the way that my mom would know to pick me up from speech team and acapella is that I would use a payphone and I would dial 1-800-COLLECT, which is the number. When they would be like ‘Please say who’s calling,’ I would go ‘Jenny at the front of school.’”
On Texting
“Here’s the weird thing: You can get so intimate with people over text and not just because you send them like a picture of your butt and you’re like ‘This is my butt.’ It’s not that. You just don’t have to feel as nervous as you feel face to face.”
On Bluetooth earpieces
“If a guy showed up with a Bluetooth earpiece in… first of all I would immediately be like ‘You’re not gonna do it for me if it’s about sex, ok?’ You don’t need that right now.”
On the use of LOL, lol, and lolol
“If someone says ‘lol’ it’s just lol. I feel like they’re like [hairflip]. Lolol is like, ‘that’s hilarious. LOL, in all caps, is surprise [laughs].”
General rules for behavior
1. “People need their own personal space.”
2. “Don’t do something over a phone that you wouldn’t do in real life, because it’s gonna have weird consequences.”
3. “You can put it down. There’s a whole world out there.”
Photo courtesy of Daniel Arnold’s Instagram account
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