The other night, we had a sudden change of plans for the next day, and A needed to contact someone to address the change. Out of a very old habit, I looked at the clock and said, “it’s after 9, you can’t call him.”

A looked at me like I had four heads, and said, “I wasn’t planning on calling him, I was going to send him a text.” I felt kind of silly, and kind of old, and said, “Oh that’s fine then.” But was it? Is a text any different from a phone call later in the evening?

A few nights later, I had the opportunity to attend a musical performance with all three kids. I did something that I usually don’t do: I turned my phone completely off. I had the three kids with me, so I knew they wouldn’t need to contact me, and any other “emergency” not involving them could wait.

When I turned my phone back on, it exploded with text messages, including one from a person who flat out asked why I hadn’t acknowledged their message or answered their questions.

Both experiences got me thinking about how much I miss the days when I wasn’t tethered to my phone, when people didn’t expect immediate gratification on the simplest requests, and the only time the phone rang after 9 p.m. (or 8 p.m., depending how civilized you were) it was a genuine dire emergency. And, yes, I’m “that old.”

Maybe my sensitivity is because I’ve gotten “the worst call you can possibly get” twice now, once at 9:47 p.m., when I immediately knew it was bad news before I even answered it, and once in the middle of a perfectly normal Saturday afternoon, when I took the person at the other end’s silence as a prank call at first.

I never like being without my phone, and I rarely turn on the do not disturb feature. This, in turn, has fed the monster in that I usually get messages quickly and respond to them quickly. When I don’t, it seems people get irritated.

Where are the boundaries these days? Is there any magical number where it’s not OK to call/text/email someone until the next morning? Thinking about that question, I remembered a few months ago, when I got phone call before 7 a.m., from someone, a complete stranger, asking me about where they could take their children for swim lessons. Now, 7 a.m. isn’t early for me, I’ve usually been up for a few hours by then, but typically, if I were making that call, I’d wait until the more standard 9-5 business hours, especially if I was contacting someone I’d never met.

Of course, just a day or so later, I had to make my own early morning emergency call to a plumber. Even then, I agonized over it, wanting to call late enough so as not to disturb anyone earlier than I had to, but early enough that he could get to my problem as soon as possible and preventing it from becoming a bigger problem.

The pandemic changed a lot of how workplaces operate, especially virtual ones, which is where I do most of my actual job. In many ways, it was a positive change.

Even now, although I’m back in the actual office a few days a week, I take advantage of flexibility to take an hour or two in the middle of the day for an appointment, and then jumping back on later in the day or evening to spend those hours catching up on emails or conversing with a colleague in another time zone.

But, recently we had a software upgrade, and now I notice that when I go to send an email to someone who may not be working in the same time zone or on the same schedule, I get a pop up message that says something along the lines of “do you want to send this email during so and so’s regular working hours?”

It should be noted that I’ve never said “yes” to that question, and I’ve sent the email at my convenience, knowing from the pile of unopened emails in my own box, that people will get to it when they get to it, regardless of when I send it. I also get plenty of emails outside of my “normal” working hours as well, so I doubt this slows down email traffic that much.

There is very little about my job that can’t wait until the next day, or even several days later. I am not a brain surgeon or a plumber, or anyone else who truly deals in emergencies, so I have no qualms about turning off the alerts for my emails on my phone, or even on my computer when I’m working.

I supposed that my phone does have that feature for calls and texts. I’ve dabbled in creating settings where only messages from my kids will alert, but I tend to forget to turn it off and then miss something important. I’ve muted certain people, or the dreaded group chats, but an unknown number will usually always alert.

I think in the end, I just want to go back to a time where the phone didn’t ring or buzz or ding at all hours of the night, and it was expected that you answered them all immediately.

I want to be able to leave my phone on, just in case someone does need to reach me in a matter of life or death, but not so that anyone with my number can ping me day or night for the most trivial of reasons. I suppose those days are long gone.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears weekly in the Times News.