I hate the telephone. I hate answering the phone. I hate calling people on the phone. I don’t like the telephone because it is rude. If a person were as inconsiderate as the telephone is they would get a punch in the mouth. No matter what you are doing it just rings when someone enters the magic numerical incantation. When it was first invented it would just keep ringing until the person on the other end of the line gave up. That’s why answering machines were invented and why they are so popular. They make the phone shut up when you are in the middle of doing something. Most of the time when people call me they are requesting information or asking if I can do something in the distant future. When people call for these reasons it really aggravates me.

For the longest time I have been against putting any sort of personally identifying information on the answering machine. I worked for a short period of time in a call center where we called businesses and conducted surveys. I can’t believe I ever took the job because of how much I hate the phone. I actually used to call people for eight hours every day. When we got any sort of recording we were usually able to verify that we had the right telephone number and even, sometimes, the name of the person we needed to talk with (we only wanted people that could answer financial questions about the company, so they needed to be at least a head accountant). You ask the secretary (who we affectionately called the “gatekeeper”) if we could talk with the Accountant or the CFO at the company. Usually asking a vague nameless question like that gets you voice mail. Well, the Voice Mail usually had their first and sometimes their last name on the recording (“Hi, you’ve reached the office of Dale Higgins…”). So then you write that down and call back later and confidently ask for Dale Higgins.

Where am I going with all this, you might ask. Well, I really want to change my answering machine message to simply give my email address and then say something like: “If you have a request you would like to make of Shawn please email shawn dot dowler at gmail dot com. That is the fastest and most reliable way to get a timely response. We are not responsible for unreturned phone calls.” I have another address I could give out that would leave out my last name. I think that might be vague enough. I don’t know how people would take such a message, though. Maybe I could add: “If this is an informational call not requiring a response, please leave a message after the beep.” I figure that that’s probably the most cordial way to handle the situation. Then it’s goodbye phone, hello email!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 20th, 2006 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Annoyances, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.