#### Communication

See also, IT. 
Having a phone makes people assume that you are available like a normal person with a phone. 
Voice mail, texting, lack of voice calls. As a homeless person a different set of options work. A job 
lead may text you and expect a response without knowing your situation or being able to properly 
imagine it. When they don’t hear back until the next day or several days later they may have a false 
impression of hesitation or similar. Sometimes relationships just need to be severed because the 
damage is irreparable, despite being imaginary. It depends as much on the ther party as on the 
homeless person. But the more ways a homeless person can make it known or get around the issue, 
the better the expected result.Dedicated abusers can make answering the phone costly in terms of energy. It’s never the goal to 
avoid callers, but callers are often unacceptably aggressive and demanding and hanging up on them 
can be used against the vulnerable person by appearing as aggressive or belligerent, making 
answering the phone a risk. It’s wise to only answer calls from known callers. A person being able to
answer the phone is an indicator of status and resources, similar to a mailing address. Shady people 
don’t answer their phone, but is a person who doesn’t answer their phone shady? People may 
assume that the answer is yes and go a different direction. Lack of status invites lack of 
charitableness in some, but there is always hope to find grace.
Relationships can be damaged by breaking the social contract around mobile usage. Having an IG 
account and not checking DMs can be perceived as missing opportunities or ignoring contact 
attempts, which later Tweets about “having no friends” can add insult to injury to.The Halo Effect 
comes into play with subsequent infractions, and eventually friends can start to reinterpret a past of 
assertiveness, productivity, and inspiration exchanges as their having been sucked dry or similar. If 
there is a mob effect then it’s almost certain to happen, and once an investment is made in the new 
image of you then mechanisms come into play to maintain that consistent image in the mind of the 
individual for the sake of group membership and perhaps even comradarie during winter months if 
it’s that type of climent (eg. Minneapolis). Lifelong friends can interpret a request for 
accommodation and help relocating as trying to scam them out of money upon blunders, such as 
failing to pay a phone bill and missing a text with a job lead. Fathers can come to view money 
lending similarly, and use their power or authority to paint an image as an adult child who does not 
have work ethic or understand how money works. They will ignore a mountain of evidence to the 
contrary which they used to praise as having been ill-gotten, perhaps “on their back,” in an attempt 
to gain acceptance and unearned credit within their social group of parents with similar problems 
with so-called lazy children. Delusion can be exceptionally strong in order to maintain social 
cohesion and spread like a virus: families are not immune from gossip and career destroying slander.
This relates to the homeless portion of the audience more so than the urban camping professional, 
but the damage can start small—picture going on vacation at work without leaving an OOO message
on, and after some weeks people will learn to get their needs met and have a negative image as 
always having shirked work if it’s even incidentally happened in the past. Trends have a way of 
filling the gap between two disparate incidents, eg. if an email was missed 2 years ago and then 
again with perfect service in between the two years of service will be perceptually lost. It’s as 
though strikes know no time.Phones were once resources that we freely shared and we rightly thought of the number as transient, 
perhaps on a shorter time frame. Homes had phones, pay phones could receive calls, and if movies 
are to be believed then people lent strangers their phone to make calls from freely. Now we have 
identity services built on top of phone numbers that are linked to our accounts such as payments and
chat. Which is the proper view? Perhaps neither, as there are other ways of addressing that do not 
require a central registry such as content hashing to the tune of Tor public keys being used as a 
routing address to reach a service that is online with the private key held only by the service holder 
and transferrable.