Thanks again for those suggestions. I’m still a little bugged that some of you are making it sound like a client called us and asked for the boss, and I just said, “I dunno…” Read the OP again; I didn’t just say “I dunno…” I gave the client all the information I had, and gave him the option of leaving a message. It’s not really that important, but c’mon.
It’s interesting though that several people have mentioned a visceral reaction to the phrase “I don’t know”. It occurs to me that this is a sort of vicious circle -
Employees honestly relate that they don’t know the answer to the question;
Clients become incensed at the phrase “I don’t know”, and pummel the employees with questions and demands for concrete answers;
Consequently, employees learn to bullshit the clients in order to make them feel like they got a concrete answer when none exists.
Clients soon discover that they are being bullshitted all the time, become more incensed, and stop believing employees even when they tell the truth.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable response on the caller’s part. Is your boss in the habit of returning to the office after he runs errands? Are the errands of a business nature or a personal nature? This is all information that you might have. As others have said, there are different degrees of uncertainty that could be implied in “I don’t know.”
Maybe there was something in the person’s tone of voice that made them sound like they were making unreasonable demands on you, but as you’ve written it here, it doesn’t seem bad at all.
Hey, wait a minute! This time “I don’t know” doesn’t mean the same thing as last time! Last time it meant, “I don’t know when he’ll be here, and he might not come back this afternoon at all.” This time it means, “I don’t know when he’ll get here, but I believe he will be back this afternoon.”
The source of conflict seems to be coming from these two factors:
Receptionists do not always share all the information they have, and/or safe assumptions they might make, about their boss’s likely whereabouts and ETA within the first ten seconds of the conversation.
When talking over the phone, people do not always carefully parse the statements they hear in a precise, literal, Vulcan-like manner and accept them as Absolute Truth, and sometimes ask for clarification, or, sometimes when the meaning is fairly obvious, they might ask for confirmation to be sure that they’ve understood.
Neither of these seem like a problem to me, just typical human communication. Now, if callers are getting snotty and combative about it, I could understand your frustration. However, with tone of voice and other such cues removed, I see nothing wrong (on either side, incidentally) of the conversations you’ve transcribed.