Hi, you’ve reached the voicemail of Yasmin Rufo. Please don't leave a message as I won’t listen to it or call you back. Unfortunately that isn't my answerphone message but do I, along with most Gen Z and millennials, wish it was? Absolutely.
A recent survey found a quarter of people aged 18 to 34 never answer the phone - respondents say they ignore the ringing, respond via text or search the number online if they don't recognise it. The Uswitch survey of 2,000 people also found that nearly 70% of 18-34s prefer a text to a phone call. For older generations, talking on the phone is normal - my parents spent their teenage years fighting with their siblings over the landline in the corridor only to then have their entire family listen in to their conversations.
In contrast, my teenage years were spent texting. From the moment I received my pink flip Nokia on my 13th birthday, I was obsessed with texting. I would spend every evening after school formulating 60-character texts to my friends, removing every unnecessary space and vowel until the message resembled jumbled up consonants even GCHQ would struggle to decipher.
After all, when it costs 10p a text there was no way I was going to spill over to 61 characters. In 2009, phone calls on my mobile would have cost a fortune. “We didn’t give you this phone so you could gossip with your friends all evening,” my parents would remind me as they looked through my monthly phone bill.
And so a generation of texters were born: mo.