According to Nielsen, (the same people who can statistically compare apples (the Super Bowl) with oranges (Real Housewives of Parma )), the phone call died in 2007.  It didn’t give an exact date, but we can assume it hovered on life support for a few months, making a comeback or two, before ceding victory. And who was it that killed the phone call? That little blip of a communication: the text.

A friend of ours was talking about the first time he saw a commercial for a new cell phone, back in the infancy of texting. Ryan Seacrest was at a party where the music was blaring, and wanted to communicate with a friend. He whipped out his phone and texted. Our friend remembers scoffing, “That’ll never catch on.” Now he’s a two-thumb texter. Needless to say, we are not following any of his stock tips.

We feel it necessary to defend the poor phone call by mentioning that if you’re having a conversation with someone via text, it may take 20 or 30 texts to equal one fifteen-minute phone call. Texting won, but it wasn’t really a fair fight. If only Nielsen could rate them by the number of words.

As Realtors, we need to stay in touch with our current clients for obvious reasons. But we also want to stay in touch with past clients, with potential future clients, and with people we just plain like. Texting works great, but there is nothing like a good ol’ phone call. Our intent is to pick up the phone every now and then and say hi. We hope to catch you at a good time, when you can chat a minute. If not, we’ll call back. We’re friendly that way.

By the way, the phone works both directions. Feel free to call us just to chat. Fair warning: we’re pretty hard to shock, but if some of you picked up the phone and called us just to say hi, we’d plotz.