[corin_]

Not really of any importance to the article, but:

> It’s not crazy for Sam Altman’s phone bill to rack up 6,000 talking minutes in a month. He talks a lot, to a lot of people.

Maybe 6000 is above average, but is it even close to 'crazy' for anyone? That's only 3.3 hours a day, I probably hit that on week days for work alone (sure plenty of people will have jobs where less phone calls are needed), and with family and friends (several who I'll have regular long chats with, rather than just 30 second calls) I think I definitely go above 6000 a month, and I don't consider myself a massively heavy phone user.

[hartie]

Do you work in sales? What do you spend so much time on the phone for? I spend ~1 hr a week on the phone and it's all to my family.

[corin_]

I don't work in sales, but in marketing - probably 70% of my work calls would be to colleagues/clients, the rest to external people (e.g. Companies we spend marketing $ with).

For example, off the top of my head I have 8 hours of normally-scheduled conference calls (before anything ad-hoc) with my main client each week - they're a big company, the people I work with there are based in offices in England, Ireland (2 locations), Holland, France (2)... and then less frequent contact with other offices in the US (mainly) and random regional offices occasionally such as Sweden and Greece in the last couple of weeks. Phone calls are really pretty important in terms of what we do with each other. (I also travel around Europe a fair bit, but that doesn't make up for day to day communications).

But I also spend a fair bit of time talking to friends and family too, I guess that's partly due to needs (I don't have long calls with people who live down the road from me) and partly just a personal preference thing (also use Skype, SMS and email, which and how much of which depends on the person).

[nknighthb]

I may have spent an hour on phone/facetime/skype/whatever calls in the past two months. Half of that to my credit card company assuring them that yes, I really am the one using my credit card in Taiwan, and the other half with family.

That's an abnormally large amount of time for me. Usually I can go days or weeks between phone calls, and when they arrive, they're nobody I want to talk to. They're almost never work related unless something has gone horribly, horribly wrong in production, and even then I try hard to get whoever I'm talking to off the damn phone quickly so I can focus on the problem.

[untog]

My phone plan has 100 minutes included. I rarely go over that.

So I suppose it's all relative. I'm not anti-social, I just don't use the phone very often.