I hate getting schooled by my kids in phone etiquette. Not because I especially mind them knowing modern life better than I do, or shuffling quietly into the sidebar of the sitcom while they ascend to main character status; just because their rules are so time-consuming. Basically, you can’t leave any message on read. If it’s a question and you don’t know the answer, you need a holding response. If it’s a meme and you like it, you need to laugh. If it’s an arrangement confirmed, you need a thumbs up, even if you suggested it so your cooperation is implied. If someone calls you, you have to pick up. If you don’t pick up, you have to call them back, but not “in due course”, when you’ve finished whatever you’re doing, but immediately, as if someone might have died.
I cling idiotically to the 20th century, where my phone works for me, I don’t work for it. It’s not unusual for me to get a message and just nod in assent, and then do my actual, in-real-life reply three days later. I am too old to learn and unlikely ever to change, but I now run a double standard, the worst of all possible worlds: boomer rules for myself and gen Z rules for everyone else. Boomer rules go under the umbrella “your mum’s Nokia corkscrew”. You can text her if you like, but she won’t reply, because she keeps her phone in the cutlery drawer, where it lies, uncharged, for use on special occasions. But when my friends don’t reply to me, I go full Snapchat generation: Why have they broken our streak? Does that previous, timely back-and-forth mean nothing to them? Was there something wrong with the way I phrased it? Do they hate me now?
There’s precedent for Zoomers in the generation above Boomers, the so-called “silent” one (ha), who grew up when phones were a relatively new invention and treat them like a fire alarm, demanding an immediate response, often accompanied by a small scream. My mum still uses her first phone number for her pin, because it only had four digits. How times change, how they remain the same.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist.
