Yes, thank you, that drives me crazy. I feel like I have been hearing it more and more lately. It’s not really wrong, I understand that, but to my ears it smacks of someone trying to use a fancypants phrase when a more straightforward one would be fine – I will return your call as soon as possible, or even Please leave your number so I may return your call.
I feel like I hear it more from younger professionals, so much so that I wonder if it appeared in some kind of goofy “Your First Job” handbook – surely they wouldn’t have come up with it by themselves, right?
I think the phrase “at my earliest convenience” is just fine.
It says exactly what it means : “I will call you back when I get around to it and don’t have more important things to do”.
Saying you will call back “as soon as possible” sounds dishonest to me.
Or what Patty O’Furniture said.
Heh as several other people have mentioned, rant the second there is in some cases purely because the person either doesn’t know how to do their own message or for one reason or another can’t be arsed.
There are several partners at the firm I work for who don’t actually know how to operate their own phones. Not particularly surprising since we got a new phone system a few months ago which is ridiculously complicated and some of these guys aren’t what you’d call technologically savvy. I just counted up - the phone has 52 buttons on it, all with different functions - as well as a little computerized screen that lets you choose from 60-odd more functions (which are seperate from, but related to, the buttons). Our telephone switchboard people can’t figure out what some of the freaking things do, so it’s not surprising that some of the partners don’t want to get into it.
There are at least three or four partners at this firm who’ve got their assistant’s voice as the voicemail message because they got sick of trying to figure out how to do it themselves and had their assistant do it for them. All the assistants got to spend three days in training on how to use the phones - partners at a large corporate law firm don’t have three days to blow on phone training, and even if they did you’d never get them to do it when they can send their assistants for all the more-complicated features.
Yeah, this sums up my view too. “At my earliest convenience” is typically a far more realistic answer than "as soon as possible. Aeschines’s complaint seems to boil down to complaining that people should be more dishonest!
And what if the “making your company seem bigger by having someone else answer the phone” thing works?! Who are you really pitting? Are you saying companies should say “well, overall I’d come across as more professional if I did X, but neverthe less for no reasons whatsoever I’m going to declare it silly and not do it”?
I also think having the “this is the office of” message is completely appropriate if the director himself would not typically answer the phone.
As far as the first part of your rant goes, does anyone ever bother to call back anyways? Telephone tag is oh so much FUN when you’re always IT. (And yes, I do leave a message saying who I am and what I’m calling about. I’ve still yet to actually have someone return a call.)
I used to get mad at a certain doctor because he couldn’t be arsed to learn the software I had designed for him. I mean, he just sits around all day fiddling with his computer, right? And it’s not like he even has to design the stuff!
Then one day I visited him in his office. I’d call it “controlled chaos”, but there was very little controlled about it. He had 8 hours to see 40 patients. That’s 12 minutes per patient and 0 minutes for lunch. He had no time to learn my silly software.
Good point, jali, but I have to add more. It wouldn’t be “nice”. It’s important. If you leave me a business message that doesn’t at least reference what you want you will be put to the bottom of the list in calling you back! I will call all the people who had the courtesy to tell me what they wanted and for whom I could get the information for.
I don’t care if you don’t like to leave messages, which is the answer I get most to this. This is a business environment, and my time is as important as yours.
My wife is a teacher, and therefore perpetually pressed for time. Her outgoing message on her work phone says that she will contact the caller “at my earliest conveinience.” This is no error in idiom or usage, either; she’s an English teacher, and given to saying precicesly what she means. In part, it’s meant to be honest: she really doesn’t have time to chat on the phone. It’s also meant to make her preferred form of communication, e-mail, look like a better option to the parents, as she responds much faster to that than voicemail.
I think “earliest opportunity” is more polite than “earliest convenience”. It kind of implies that you will call back even if it’s not really all that convenient. Of course, the end result remains the same. You’ll call back when it’s convenient for you.
There is no charge for that idea, so feel free to use it.
I don’t know about that; I think the point of that particular part of the OP is that it’s a rude way to convey a simple message.
Some things just come off wrong, even when spoken with impeccable grammar.
Just two points: I work with someone who had his assistant/secretary do his voicemail message, and yes, he is a rather important person. But the reason he didn’t record the message is that the idea of touch-tone phones is still a novelty to him. He’s the kind of guy who you might catch picking up the phone, clicking the hook a few times, and asking for PEnnsylvania 6-5000. He’s also the least pretentious person on earth.
Second, the amount of anger at voicemail leads me to believe that you get people’s voicemail a lot. Are you a telemarketer? Do you also get frustrated when people don’t leave the model number of their copies on their voicemail?
As to rant #2, I have worked at two companies where the voice mail message to your office number was in place and recorded days before I started my first day. At least in one case, the firm wanted a uniform voice and uniform wording in an attempt to be “egalitarian”. Luckily, my last few jobs have had “calls go through the secretary” policies, negating the whole problem.
