Bye, bye, bye, bye
A phone call can’t just stop. In a room, the body ends a conversation: someone stands, finds their keys, turns towards the door, and the words only have to agree with what the body has already said. On the phone there is no body. The ending has to be made out of talk, and talk has a problem built into it. Whenever one person stops speaking, the other is entitled to start. Nothing in a pause says and that was the last one.
The classic paper on this is Emanuel Schegloff and Harvey Sacks’s “Opening Up Closings”, from 1973, and it describes the fix. Before anyone says goodbye, somebody says something with no news in it at all. “Okay.” “Right then.” “Well.” It is a turn with nothing in it, and it offers the other person a turn too. If they answer with another empty one, both have passed up the chance to say more, and the closing can begin. If they still have something (the paper calls these “unmentioned mentionables”), this is the place for it, and the call opens up again.
That is where the things people meant to end on actually get said. “Love you.” “Let me know how it goes.” “Say hi to your mum.” They come in just after the first “okay”, and they get answered. Then comes the part nobody plans.
Listen to the end of a call in much of the English-speaking world and you hear a string of byes, from both ends at once, each one shorter and lower than the last. Okay, bye — bye — bye-bye — bye — bye. Nobody would write that as dialogue, and it isn’t telling the other person anything. It is two people at a door, each holding it for the other.
The trouble is the button. Whoever presses it decides the last sound the other one hears. Hang up while they are still mid-bye and you have cut them off, by one syllable, and it feels rude even though neither of you could say why. So each of you keeps saying bye until you are fairly sure the other has finished, while the other is doing exactly the same. The byes get smaller because both of you are trailing off and listening. The string ends when one of you takes the risk. Teenagers who are in love have made the stalemate explicit. “You hang up.” “No, you hang up.” It’s the same structure, said out loud.
Some places settle it with a rule. Japanese business etiquette guides have one: the person who made the call hangs up first, unless the other party is a customer or a superior, in which case you wait for them. Either way you put the receiver down gently, so that the click, which is the one sound nobody can soften with a word, is at least a quiet one.
Video calls broke even the button. There is no click. The window shuts on a face caught mid-wave. And because the camera is still running while you look for “Leave”, people go on smiling at the screen while their eyes search the corner of it. The last thing many meetings show anyone is a row of faces looking for a button.
So the thing you meant to end on was said a minute earlier, in the gap after “okay”, and it got its answer. What actually ends the call came later and was never meant at all. Almost every call ends on half a bye, cut off by the person it was said to.
Thread: the carrier wave
Coordinates: conversation · manners