There is nothing more irritating than when a colleague does not answer the phone, respond to email or ignores texts. In a business where "time is of the essence" every minute counts, and colleagues who ignore contact efforts are the mud that slows the process down, right? With that said, I question whether our hyper-connected society has fostered more angst than is necessary?
Of course I can be one of those who gets annoyed when a call, text or email seems to be 
ignored. I have people on my end texting, emailing and calling me asking for answers too. I do tend to feel a bit foolish when my response is, "I have no information yet. I can't seem to get hold of the other agent." For some reason, that seems to make the client think I can't get the job done rather than the other side is not responding. There is little I can do about that.
There is another side to this scenario. Maybe, just maybe the listing agent, buyers agent, lender, closing attorney can't respond. Yesterday, one of my go to lenders didn't respond to a battery of calls. That was very out of character for him. Not long after the initial barrage of calls, texts and emails, he called back. His car had broken down on a major highway and he was out of the vehicle trying to get help. He wasn't ignoring anyone. He was trying to get his disabled vehicle to a safe spot.
A few years ago, a listing broker seemed to be ignoring time critical requests for information. A few days went by before she responded. She had been in the emergency room with her dying sister. Suddenly, real estate seemed very unimportant. Only those who were in the dark were frustrated. She was focused on the last moments of a life-long relationship. Deals come and go, but family is irreplaceable.
In another case this week, an agent didn't respond to multiple calls, texts and emails over an issue that had legal ramifications. After a few days, her office finally called and said she was in a place with no cell service and no Internet. She was on vacation. Should she have had a well informed back-up in the office? Sure, but the amount of information she would have had to impart to a colleague was voluminous, and a colleague would not have been able to make decisions for this agent's clients. She literally left her vacation area, found a place where she could make a cell call only to find out her voice-mail was filled with irritated colleagues looking for answers. Happy vacation!
Has our time of instant access, instant answers and instant contact made us impatient, void of grace and understanding and blind to our own life interruptions? I'm not so sure that our pre-cellphones, pre-Internet, pre-constant contact times were so bad after all. Maybe, those times allowed for a little more grace and understanding. It might not have been such a burden when an agent had to return to the office to gather messages that warranted a return call. The caller knew the call would come later. The agent knew it was important, and the process worked itself out.
I challenge you to put yourself in the shoes of those on the other end of these scenarios. Would it be a bad thing if we received an answer in a hour instead in five minutes? Would it be possible to explain to a client that an answer might not be immediate, but as soon as it comes in the information will be relayed? Does your doctor call back within a few minutes? How about your attorney? Even your auto-mechanic probably doesn't pick up the phone immediately or return an email or text. How is it that the real estate industry has become so hyper-intense that patience is lost, the worst is imagined and the collegial component is often lost? Our addiction to instant information may be making us less informed about the manners of a healthy social society and more likely to be a part of its decline.
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