Thursday, July 29, 2010

Sorry, I can Not Hear You, I'm Kinda Busy...

It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of the telephone.

This was completely understandable during my internship and residency when I would get calls at 2am like "Hi Dr. B. Your patient just arrested. Do you want us to keep doing CPR?" or "We have an owner on the line whose ferret just had a bookcase fall on it and now it can't move its back legs. Do they need to come in?" (Yes, those were actual calls I received on two different nights.)

However, my hatred of the telephone goes back at least a decade before that. I went for months at least once without answering my home phone. Granted, all I ever ended up with on the answering machine was some old guy loudly repeating "Marta?.... Marta?...", but still.

I realize that this is somewhat heretical since a cell phone company pays my bills, but audio quality on cell phones is terrible and seems to be getting worse. As much as I like to blame everything on my LG Chocolate POS, it's just the nature of cell phones. I'd rather not talk to anyone than try to carry on a conversation on a cell phone.

And now, of course, they're switching all the phones at work to VOIP (voice over IP, which is all digital). We had the old and new phones active this week, and guess what? The VOIP phones have terrible sound quality and have a noticeable lag. This is progress.

Anyhow, I was setting up my voice mail on the new phone, and after I recorded my name, I got to the section on recording a greeting. It started with "Outgoing greetings encourage people to leave you messages."

That was all I needed to know. I left it blank.

2 comments:

JJ said...

Yeah, it is rather strange considering your current career. However, it totally works with your personality. All of it. The hating-phones-while-working-for-a-cell-phone-company.

Theresa B (of Nebulopathy) said...

If only "professional hermit" were a career choice... I would excel at that.