Most of the calls I receive are quick and can be handled whenever. People generally don’t call me unless it’s something important. Often, missing the call will inconvenience both the caller and me. If it’s for a long conversation it’s usually pre-planned or on Sunday.
So yes, I’m going to answer the phone. If you need more than a minute, don’t waste my time with a call. Email me. I can read 10x faster than you can talk. If it absolutely must be handled over the phone, be prepared to wait.
I’ve got a couple people who I’ll click over for…my dad and my mother in law. If a particular friend of mine calls, I know it’s probably to tell me about the doobie party she had the night before, so I just let her go to voicemail. But with the elders, it might really be something important so I’ll interrupt what I’m doing for them. I also click over from personal calls if a work person calls me.
I hope you guys aren’t the same people who get offended at the idea of text messaging (applies to cell phones only, naturally). Being able to text instead of call is perfect in these sorts of situations.
Yes, some people are in that situation, but the overwhelming minority are not and are just slaves to their ringtones and answering when they shouldn’t.
Mesquite-oh, I think most posters are talking about those who pick up the phone and don’t even assess the importance of the call – they just answer, say they can’t talk and hang up.
Geez, if you’d just not answered and it went to voicemail, I’d have figured out YOU CAN’T TALK RIGHT NOW.
Dusty Rose, I think you’re right about Sicko.
I can’t respond right now, so uh, I’ll respond later.
I’ll make you a deal. I’ll work on getting people to stop picking up when I’m busy if you get them to let me ignore a phone call. If I don’t answer the first time they’ll call me back 10 times in a half an hour. And it’s for absolutely nothing when i do get to them. it’s like I’m not allowed to not have the phone on me. Or, god forbid, maybe not want to talk on it.
Some phones, you can just hit the end button to silence it if it’s ringing, and it’ll pass the caller to voice mail. I’ve noticed that at least with my flip phone though, the only way to do that is to open the phone, which answers the call anyways. So yeah, sometimes I have to do the “Can’t talk nowclick” routine, or if one of my superiors is talking to me, it’s more like answerclick if the phone should ring)
All this means, of course, is that I should invest in a phone where I can hit the end button without answering the phone first.
You’re not calling from one of those numbers that comes up as ‘private number’ (or whatever the US equivalent is), are you? Quite a lot of companies have them here, and most hospitals do too. I’ve answered a couple of calls from such numbers, because it could be an emergency, and the salesman on the other end has been really annoyed when I didn’t have the time to carry on talking. Same if it’s a landline I’m not familiar with.
I might answer in case it’s an important call, but I won’t decide to be late for work just because some salesman wants my money.
That’s a very good way for them to ensure they never get a sale from me.
One school I taught in had a phone nin every classroom. It could be used for outside calls - I had to make a call to a parent pretty much every day - but its main purpose was for internal calls. Say, the office might call up to say ‘so-and-so and whatsisname had a fight - keep them seperated today.’ Or a colleague might call to ask if I have the copies of Stone Cold.
There was no way of knowing whether the call coming through was a quick message of that type, or whether it was a parent who needed to talk for longer.