ONE
“…And I will return your call at my earliest convenience.”
NO, dumbfuck, you are supposed to worry about the other guy’s convenience, not your own. This is a flat-out ignorant error, and I hear it quite a bit.
TWO
Is it, or is it not completely ludicrous when the executive types have their “admins” do their voice mail message for them?
“You have reached the office of Blowme Blowhard. He is unable to come to the phone right now, put please…”
As though these fuckers are too busy to spend five minutes max to make their own message. Or do they think that doing so will make them one of the hoi polloi?
THREE
Mobile phone voice mail is just ridiculous these days. First you have to put up with the person’s own message. Then the Electronic Lady comes on and asks you if you want to push 5 “to page this person.” Tell me, what the fuck good is the paging function, anyway? All it does is send a text message or whatever with your phone number; it doesn’t really “page” the person. Huh.
Then the Electronic Lady follows this up with, “Leave a message after the tone.” No fuckin’ way–after the tone? The tone? Imagine that!
So you dictate in your messages exactly when the recipient should call you back? I’ll return a call when I damn well feel like it. Since you have no idea what is keeping the person from answering their phone, it seems to me that the ignorant one is yourself.
I’ll call you back as soon as it’s convenient for me. What’s wrong with that? If it’s urgent, mark the message urgent and I’ll get paged.
How am I supposed to know when it’s a convenient time for YOU?
If I’m a VP, I can’t imagine giving a clerk the password to my voicemail box. Security issues and all that. I suppose if I was in bed with malaria or something, I’d ask somebody to set an OGM for me.
It does page me. My phone makes a pager-like sound that’s a little less obnoxious than the ringing and I get a number in the display just like I did when I had a text pager. I hit “send” to dial the number. With an old style pager, I’d have to locate a phone and manually dial the numbers to call the person back.
No, she says “after the tone, leave a message. To page this person, press five now. (beep)”
Point the first: stupid shit manglings of phraseology is always enough to provoke one to chew glass into a fine paste. Here, “for all intensive purposes” oughta distract you from “at my convenience.”
The second: never heard that one before, but that is pretty funny. What a busy guy he must be! :rolleyes:
The third: I feel your pain.
Five minutes of instructions drive me insane. No, I will not press 69 to activate the 50V paging chip implanted in this Cingular user’s nether regions. Just give me the beep, you fuckers.
At a company I used to work at, most of the phone voice mails are my name and/or my voice becaue no one else there could figure out how to change the messages. I worked at several different desks and finally had to go back to the other phones and change at least my name to a more generic job function so customers calling in wouldn’t get so confused with every extension saying " This is Adhemar, please leave your anme and number at the tone and I’ll get back to you". I also had to go and remove all of the Christmas messages t he boss made us (me) do, once the holidays were over.
I don’t have much to say about #1 and 2, though I do hate it when I’m trying to do business with someone and that person never calls me back. Or calls me back many days later. If you want my business, return my calls. If not, I’ll give my money to someone who does.
But #3 really is a PITA. “To page this person, press 5 now. At the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, please hang up or press 1 for more options. Please leave your message after the tone. Thank you.”
Having to listen to this every single time I leave a message for someone is fucking annoying. One my friends has the option where you can just press 1 to skip straight to the beep. Why don’t all phones have this?
If calls were returned at the original caller’s convenience, that would have to be when you were making the message in the first place. You think you’re so hot people have to drop everything to call you back. Nope.
Our secretary did everyone’s initial message because the phone rep tied her up for two hours of training. The rest of us didn’t learn all the menu options until a few days later, and by then we didn’t even consider what our outgoing message might say. We never hear it, after all.
The paging option is just standard with some packages. But again, the person you’re calling probably never heard that. When I call my voicemail from my cell, it knows it’s me and goes straight into the message retrieval menu. I don’t know if I have a push 5 option or not, but since none of my friends are hotheads like you, I’ll probably never know what options they hear.
My theory about point #3 is that the EVIL PHONE COMPANIES devised this long, drawn out intro to voicemail in order to make it more likely that calls will go over the one minute mark.
You don’t understand the point. “Please call me at your earliest convenience” is the traditional use of the phrase. Reversing it to “at my earliest convenience” is a mistake in using language that also sounds self-centered because of the traditional meaning of the phrase. “I will call you back as soon as possible” is the right way to say and has the same meaning.
I don’t give a shit what happened at your company. I see would-be bigwigs having their admins do their messages and not hoi polloi; it’s obvious that the bigwigs think that stooping to make their own voice mail degrades their stature somehow.
I know a guy who had his wife make his voice mail message as, “This is XYZ Corporation.” What the fuck?! It’s the guy’s cell phone, not a corporate switchboard.
Also, sometimes one-man companies have a chick make the message to make the company seem bigger. Ridiculous.
Even if they knew about it, there’s nothing they can do about it. The problem isn’t their knowledge, it’s the actual voice mail system.
Per #3 - Not to rain on your rant or anything, but on 95% of the voice mail systems I am familiar with, if you press * during the message, you go straight to the tone (where you leave your message for that person to call you back at your convenience).
I find this feature very handy to avoid the 45 second cutesy message my daughter has on her cell phone. I’ve tried to explain to her that the time people spend listening to her message is eating up her cell minutes. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I did get her to shorten the message just a little bit.
[QUOTE=Aeschines] ONE
“…And I will return your call at my earliest convenience.”
Not sure I’ve heard this on any outgoing messages, but I agree, if you think about it, it’s rude and pretentious. I assume they’re attempting to sound gracious and accomodating, but this doesn’t really cut it.
TWO
When I encounter this, my gut reaction is the same as yours; self-important asshole.
That being said, having been an assistant to all manner of high level execs, more often than not they’re just intimidated by the phone system and it’s just “easier for them” to have me do it. Not excusing it, just saying some have a hard time with it. That’s when I mentally compare our salaries :rolleyes:
THREE
Don’t know to much about the page function thing, but I agree it is frustrating having to sit through umpteen options when all I want to do is leave my message and move along.
This goes along with the previous complaint. It’s just more wasted time stating the obvious when the vast majority of us have grasped the procedure of the message leaving process.
If you think about it?? Stop psychoanalyzing people’s OGM’s and just take them at face value. Give people the benefit of doubt - or do you think their intent really was to impart rudeness?
If “Please call me at your earliest convenience” is a proper request, why isn’t “alright, I will call you back at my earliest convenience” an acceptable response?
But what should I say if I am not going to call you back as soon as possible? As soon as possible would mean I have to drop everything and call back right now since it’s possible for me to do so. I will call back as soon as it’s convenient for me to do so, and that’s that.
“Chick”? How old are you? Any how does that make the company seem bigger, anyway?
And as long as I’m here I’ll go back and hit this one:
What are you objecting to here - the tone? What should it be if not a tone, a gong? Wind chimes? “Leave a message after the ricochetting bullet sound” - pachinnnnng" Now that would be cool.
I dunno; when I call someone, I use the “please call me at your earliest convenience” phrase if I’ve stated to some degree what it is I need from them. I wouldn’t presume to leave a generic “Hi, this is ** WOOK** …” type of message and expect them to hop to it. It seems to me that, not knowing who is hearing the greeting or what the message might entail, it kind of sends a message of " I’ll get back to you when I feel like it ". In reality, that’s pretty much what we all do; get back when we can. I just don’t think it’s the classiest way to phrase it. No big, though.
You obviously don’t know how stock phrases and idioms work. If I say, “Please call me back when you have the time,” that sounds polite. If I reverse it and say, “I’ll call you back when I have the time,” that sounds rude and dickish.
It’s a stock phrase used in voice mail messages to sound generally polite to anyone who should call you. There may be callers you’d like to say “fuck you” to, but you don’t put that message in your VM.
You require many explanations. By using that word I am imputing a backward view of women to the people who have women make these messages for them. I have yet to see anyone have a man make his message for him. By having a woman do it, they mean to portray their company as having a woman playing that hostess role, as many companies do (how many companies have men at the front desk?).
It makes the company seem bigger for several quite simple reasons, the most obvious of which is that the woman’s voice is clearly not that of the company’s sole employee, a man, implying that the company has at least two employees.
No, I am making fun of the fact that such obvious instructions are given when wholly unnecessary.
That would indeed be cool. Hey, can I get that as my ringtone?
I agree that people telling you they will call you back “at my earliest convenience” does indeed sound arrogant. It sounds a lot like “I’ll call you back when I get around to it,” which, truth though it might be, doesn’t need to be announced on a message. “Please call me back at your earliest convenience” indicates that you understand that the person you’re calling is busy and you aren’t their only client or whatever, but you would still like the courtesy of a return call when it is convenient for them to do it. It’s a nuance, which people oblivious to nuances might not get, I suppose.
Bigwigs getting their admins to leave their voicemail messages - I haven’t run into this before, but if I did, I would also think, “Self-important asshole.” Then again, I’ve worked as an admin for eight years now, and had experiences like some upper-level guy walking past the photocopier to get me to photocopy a one page document for him. At the company I’m at now, the owner has been known to clean the bathrooms when they needed it. Now, there’s a guy who doesn’t have an overblown sense of his own importance.
The third one - well, that doesn’t bug me too much. Just another opportunity to work on my patience.
Me: “Um …” [beginning to realise that Them may be playing that stupid answer machine joke]
Them: “Heh heh, yeah, this is Them. Leave me a mess…”
Me: “Rot in Hell, asshole!” [I hang up before the tone. Fuckers don’t even deserve to hear my cursing]
:rolleyes: Yeah, maybe that whole bit was slightly funny, tho still annoying, way back in 1975!
for the OP:
#1 - I get your point, but I doubt most people doing it are aware of how it sounds. I’m sure they think they’re being pleasant.
#2 - Fuck 'em! Arrogant bastards. I’m gonna go find a tourist or someone, barely conversant at all in English, and have them do my new voicemail announcement.
#3 - All these years and I didn’t know the * trick. I shall be attempting to use it on calls from here on out.
If someone leaves me a message it would be nice to know the REASON for the call. So many times callers just say, “this is caller, please give me a call back.”
The ones that get the call backs from me leave messages similar to: "Hi this is caller, I want to verify xyz information, please call me back.
Some people in business assume we’re aware of the company they represent (big shots) just based on their names. I generally file by company name so ‘caller’ doesn’t really mean much by itself unless we’ve already established a relationship. I prioritize call backs regarding business higher than invitations to a ball game, so the reason for the call is important.
Perhaps the company you’re calling really does want your business, but if you didn’t leave details they may not be aware of who you are or what you want.
Right now our company is hiring. So many candidates are making follow up calls leaving just their names. Cold callers leave similar messages - just a name. We are unable to return every call since actual work must take place here too and we expect professionals in the business to give better information to ensure their calls are returned.