Bilateral conference call

Conference Call Anatomy™ →Go uptown Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Conference call Office life Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Also known as a “telephone call”.

How much time has been wasted and exasperation wrought on the world by this fashion of scheduling bilateral conference calls, which both parties must dial into, rather than the traditional, and perfectly sensible, practice of just calling the other person?

Certainly, if you expect JC to be paying attention to his Outlook calendar — a cruel matrix which, like the bathroom mirror, frightens and revolts him at the best of times — you have another think coming. You will have to call him to coax him into dialing in, in which case —

Just call me, okay?

But there is a more practical objection: time. Not only do pre-arranged calls, like judder bars, break up the flow of one’s day, thus interrupting you from getting on with what you would otherwise rather be doing (which, Q.E.D. won’t be speaking to this interlocutor: if it was, you would be calling her) but, thanks to the tyranny of Microsoft Outlook, they will commit you to at least quarter and probably half an hour. And if you give a legal eagle a quarter-hour to say something, she will take it.

But no telephone conversation needs to be that long.

Furthermore, there is a delay. We can infer that, while your problem won’t be the most pressing matter for me, it must be important to you, in which case delaying its resolution until mid-morning of Tuesday next week, which is what, by scheduling a “bilateral call” with me then, you are proposing to do, injects four days of waste into whatever project it is you are running.

Lastly, if you are in written exchanges with someone about a bilateral call you would like to have with them tomorrow, you have already interrupted their flow: you have already stopped them from doing whatever else it was that they were doing. So, seeing as most calls can be dispensed with in five minutes just pick up the goddamn phone and get it over with.

Just call me, okay?

See also

• Waste and in particular waiting
• On a more cerebral note, a long and playful essay about the bilaterality of the ISDA Master Agreement