It’s official: Millennials hate phone calls + Mountain goats v bighorn sheep showdown over salt deposits
Generation Mute: Millennials are more phone anxious than most other age brackets, with over 80% needing to summon the courage to place a call, The Financial Times reports, citing data from bankmycell. The phenomenon has led some consultancy firms to charge up to USD 3k a day to intervene and train employees on basic phone skills and overcoming fear of phone calls. “I would say 40% of my business is now focused on phone anxiety, whereas when I started the company 16 years ago it might have been 10%,” one phone use consultancy founder says.
This phone call aversion is not dissimilar to real-life avoidance around the office: Desk-bombing, a new office life buzzword, refers to people who would prefer to stop by desks and chat informally instead of emailing their coworker who is sitting right in their line of sight. Whereas phone anxiety appears to be most prevalent among millennials, avoiding desk-bombing (and instead opting to, say, emailing a coworker who sits closeby enough to warrant a verbal conversation) doesn’t seem to be an age-specific phenomenon, the salmon-colored paper says.
One strange byproduct of global warming? Mountain goats and bighorn sheep in Montana’s Glacier National Park are fighting over who gets to lick up exposed salt deposits, according to a study by ecologists and conservationists picked up by the Washington Post. Melting mountain glaciers in the park have revealed long buried salt licks, coveted for mineral supply animals don’t get from the rest of their diet.
There’s bullying in the animal kingdom, too: The goats are generally coming out on top in the fight over salt deposits, driving sheep away using their saber-like horns and aggressive attitudes, according to the researchers. More important than their characteristic aggression, however, is the fact that climate change and its impacts on resource availability means that these types of conflicts are more likely to happen more frequently, the researchers say, noting that there remains little knowledge about what the long-term effects could be.