When the Smartfella? was still in the working world, he became aware of a modern day phenomena whereby the people who were working around me had developed a habit of sitting at their desks and letting the phones on their desks ring until the voice mail system picked up.
They did not think that there was anything wrong with this technique. When it first started happening, I said something about their ringing phone, they would sometimes look annoyed and tell me something like, “I’m busy”.
I quickly realized that I was “old school” and I backed off. The thing I had difficulty getting my mind around was that they did not look busy. That is, unless you are willing to accept playing solitaire as a part of your definition of “busy”.
Now that I have been in retirement all these years it seems that there is less and less opportunity to talk to humans out there. Actually it has gotten worse than simply, “Let it go to voice mail”. Allow me to give you a recent example…
§ Called and got into a voice mail message that told me the person who’s recording I was listening to was out until the following Monday.
§ His slick message told me to call another person who would help me and he even gave me the other person’s number.
§ I called the other person.
§ She was out of the office till Tuesday and her message told me to call the person whose message had told me to call her.
Now am I just being an old geezer about this or is there a real problem out there?
Would I kid u?
