Read tracking is very useful when you deal with people who don't check their email. I know some old people who "got hacked", and as a result they are scared of email and won't check it unless called and told of something important. (emailing semi-private pictures and directions is often useful)
"Telephone anxiety", is a thing, as I've come to learn recently about some of my cohorts when I'd ask this very question:
"did you call and ask this person for the follow-up you're claiming they haven't given you in three days?"
I had no clue-now I'm not going to press the matter and push the person into it, yet at the same time here we're sitting on a decision being left open by one person, and not being acted on at all by another.
Makes for some interesting manager decisions, it does.
Take a kid, who has a phone, and a peer group with elaborate customs around using it, which include never, ever calling someone without texting first. Maybe your best friend and main squeeze, as a special privilege.
Then the parent insists the child pick up the phone whenever they call. Also, there are spam calls, and the occasional genuine emergency.
Presto, the phone ringing is automatically Bad News, and as the child grows to adulthood, they associate phone calls with trouble, and subconsciously feel like an aggressive, bad person, if they have to make one.
Phone calls are, after all, even more aggressively demanding that someone else's attention be, right now, dedicated to dealing with you than any tracker.
Then the parent insists the child pick up the phone whenever they call. Also, there are spam calls, and the occasional genuine emergency
Coming from someone who had a parent who liked to LIE (yes, straight up bold faced lie) about there being a “family emergency” because I didn’t answer each and every single phone call they made fast enough (surprise, teenage me had a job and I couldn’t just stop making pizzas because dad wanted another check-in) I completely empathize
