Communication fatigue: Does anybody reply to anything any more?

1. We needed a little bit of help in our house a few weeks ago. Nothing too heavy, but heavy enough for us to need some urgent advice and someone to talk to to help us solve some issues. Basically, some kind of Relate-style counselling forum. I look through the Relate website and find our nearest counsellor. I phone and it’s an answerphone. No problem, leave a message. No reply.
2. I crashed my car, and I’m still looking for a replacement door. I find something on eBay and ask a question. I’m trying to buy this thing for £150 or whatever but I’m not going to buy it without knowing a couple of things. I send an email, I leave a phone message. No reply.
3. I find a couple of advertising opportunities for my clients. I figure they’re worth a fair bit of money to both my client and the advertiser. All is sweet. The only way to contact them? A contact form on the website. I fill it in. Days pass. I go back and fill in the form again. No reply. I look further and find a phone number. “Someone will call me back”. They don’t.
4. My current MP has voted, time and again, for terrible bills. He’s the most loyal of loyalists who apparently has no qualms about voting for ID cards, smoking bans, carbon trading schemes and a host of other issues where the public themselves are conflicted. I write to him to ask about his record on the issues of climate change and ID cards in particular, spelling out why I have concerns with his position and asking if he could clarify his reasons. No reply.

It would be easy to be terribly downbeat about these things and put it down to some kind of modern malaise – practically a free opinion-piece for the Daily Mail there. In one of these cases, the counsellor could, for all he knows, have got the message from someone on the point of suicide or killing their kids. In the other two cases, I’m literally trying to give them some money – potentially lots of it – and my efforts are greeted with silence. In the final one, I’m contacting a man elected to represent my concerns in Parliament and to take account of them when making decisions on how to vote in Parliament. He too, cannot it seems answer an email.

It’s hardly uncommon. But I don’t blame any kind of general decline in personal values. I do think however that the ease of communication which has wrought so many benefits in so many ways also comes with a degree of “communication fatigue”. My own inbox is full of enquiries after my health from friends and family that go unread and unanswered for days… weeks, even. And who amongst us hasn’t worked in an office where an appreciable portion of the working day is actually spent doing nothing more than making calls and answering emails? It’s easy to get sick of it.

Even so: just answer the bloody phone!