Are good phone manners important?

As I pretended to watch television about a month ago, I overheard my brother and niece get into a fight about phone manners. She, at eleven years old, is certain that she'll never have to use "please" and "thank you" when speaking on the telephone. She made her assertion by screaming at him at the top of her lungs, screaming in a manner that is often accompanied by an eye roll.

Anyway, the more I thought about, the more I considered how we're sending a generation of kids out into the world with no knowledge of how to even conduct the simplest functions necessary for a telephone call: asking to speak to someone, hearing a polite response back, leaving a good message, or even answering the telephone itself.

I decided, for a class project on Captivate, to make a phone manners tutorial. This is fairly basic, intended for kids eleven to twelve years old. When I spoke with parents of my niece's friends, a lot of them expressed interest in using the phone manners tutorial on their own kids, so I got the impression that there is a need for this type of thing.

Just click on the linked title here. It's a Flash video, so your browser might need to download a plugin. Otherwise, it should work fine.