Youi’ll get through, but he can’t hear you because the party is too loud, and then you hear your wifes voice hollering “OK, who’s next?”
I have a guy in the cube next to me that has a cell phone that his wife bought him last Christmas so she can get a hold of him no matter where he is. She will call his desk phone but if he happens to be on the thing then she calls his cell over and over and over again. This results in listening to his stupid ring tone until the voicemail kicks in. If to much time goes by, twenty minutes, she will have him paged.
When he finally gets off the phone I get to listen to him explain that he was on his desk phone and that is why he did not answer it which is the same reason he did not answer the cell.
Bob: What did you want?
Bob: I was on the phone
Bob: With the operations department
Bob: I did not answer my cell because I was on the phone
Bob: Well I can’t talk on two phones at once
Bob: No I don’t know where you put the coffee
Bob: because I don’t know
Bob: did you look in the cupboard?
Bob: Then maybe we are out of it
Bob: No, I don’t know
Bob: Call Christi and see if she can bring you some
Bob: Okay then we will just pick up some later
Bob: Okay bye
She calls at least 25 times a day if not more and it always about some sort of mundane crap that in no way deserves a grilling about why he did not answer the phone. Hell most of it does not even require a phone call in the first place.
Some days it takes all the power within me not to ask Bob to tell his wife to fuck off already.
Next time you’re unattended with his phone, change his outgoing voicemail message.
- Depending upon his actual sexual preference.
I would be a self-inflicted widower before too long. Wait, no, no I wouldn’t. Because I would never get involved with anyone so insanely codependent and clingy in the first place.
What is really sad is they are not a young couple. Bob is in his mid fifties, has been married for many many years with grown children and grand children.
I can only assume his wife was “normal” at on point but she gets more fucked up every year.
At tax refund time he made an error in entering the bank routing number on their tax refund. The calls that day were just horrible. At one point Bob was out having a smoke and I went outside to have one too and he told me his wife said he had just ruined her whole life and she was going to kill herself and it was all his fault.
Nice huh?
I can’t imagine living with such a loon. For better or worse my ass.
We did that to a friend who never ever took his phone with him when he left the room. Changed the language to Hebrew (because people who know only English can at least make good guesses about what’s written in French, German or Spanish) and then locked the phone with a new password.
It took him two days to get it working right again, and to my knowledge never let that thing out of his sight again.
A cow-orker here would leave their phone on their desk when they went to lunch, meetings, wherever. Their phone had a loud obnoxious ring - not even a ringtone, just an annoying built-in one, and would go EEEP! every sixty seconds afterward to advise the world that they’d missed a call.
After they came back from a meeting to find their trashcan upended on their desk to cover the phone, they got the hint.
Record a new voicemail message for him.
“Jim’s Pizza Delivery and Abortion Clinic. Your loss is our sauce. How may we help you?”
I wish I could take credit for that line.
Change his ringtone to this. NSFW and turn down your speakers.
I got a fun phone prank that is much less malicious, but very satisfying. If someone leaves their phone, go into their settings and change their banner to read “Low Battery” or “No Signal”. I had a roomate actually take his phone into be serviced because it was under warrenty and it wouldn’t take a charge. I’m sure the guy at US Cellular got a real kick out of telling him that his battery was just fine.
If you have an office with dropped ceiling panels, take a cue from the U.S. version of The Office: Wait until he leaves his phone unattended, stand on his chair and pop up a ceiling panel and throw the phone as far as you can into the ceiling.
Then when he comes back, call his cell phone repeatedly.
Genius. We do have dropped ceiling panels!
ETA: In fact that’s the perfect place for one of those annoy-atron things that beep at random intervals.