It's always comforting to know that people feel at ease when making calls — a survey by the Post Office last year revealed that 40% of men make phone calls while naked, whereas only 27% of women do. The survey also suggests that most of us will happily watch TV while calling (62%) and one in ten of us will leave the other person talking to themselves while we go off and do something else.

It would have been interesting to see the breakdown of the other statistics by sex too, but I can't seem to track them down. I suppose the archetypal 'calling bird' is Prunella Scales' Sybil Fawlty, with her perennial chats with the mysterious Audrey, though in Sybil's case she's too engrossed in the phone calls to assist Basil with anything.

On a more serious note, it would be interesting to compare attention data from now with that from ten years ago — have Skype, email, IM and mobiles change the degree of respect with which we treat the people we're talking to? Or do they just allow us to do more? I can happily keep multiple Skype chats or other IM conversations going at once, for example, but would it be more efficient to call each person in turn? Quite often I find myself giving up on IM as it's too slow, and changing to voice.

In any case, for more on the calling birds, the BBC's h2g2 site has some suggestions…