Uuuh, someone called me? Phone pet peeves. mild sorry no profanity

The BBQ Pit
1

Yeah, that’s exactly what some doofus said when I answered the phone at my month old job at a gym.

Caller; Umm someone called me?
Me: Was it an employee or a club member
Caller: I don’t konw, it was just on my phone
Me: (???), our phone number was on your caller ID?
Caller: Well no, I called there and left a message for someone to call and they called and I don’t know who it was
Me: Do you know who you left the original message with?
Caller: Um, yeah, I think it was accounting, they called before wanting to know something about my bill (me thinking: probably if you were going to PAY it).
Me (knowledge dawning): would you like to be transferred to accounting?
Caller: well, you can’t tell me who called me?
Me thinking: (You want us to tell you who called you, when YOU don’t know who you even called in the first place?)
Me what I actually said: No ma’am, I’m the shift manager, I don’t have any way of knowing what department you might have left a message with, or who from that department might have returned your call, but if you think you left a message with accounting I can transfer you, and they can help you with your bill.
Caller: um, okay, if you don’t know who called me.
(what? I can read minds now? I don’t think there’d be much to read in YOURS even if I could).

So, I transfer her and start helping other club members. Then, the phone rings, I hear one of the regular front desk girls having almost the same exact conversation, on her end, that I’d just had not 5 seconds before.

She hangs up, and then another manager comes up to help me with some other stuff, the phone rings and then HE has the exact same conversation on his end as the front desk girl and I had just had.

Not only couldn’t this woman figure it out in the FIRST place, she couldn’t figure out how to stay on hold long enough to be helped or to leave a message to be called back, and Freaking REMEMBER who she’d called so as to deal with it when they DID.

Okay, people who hang up instead of apologizing when they dial a wrong number, mere seconds of not even quite annoyance.
People who are rude on the phone, yeah, kinda annoying, but sometimes a bit understandable, especially if they have a legitimate gripe. But, at least they MAKE SENSE and put two words together in a sentence and impart the general idea of their gripe!!! GAAAAh!!!

My number one pet peeve, people who canNOT seem to gather their thoughts enough to make sense. It’s as if they were never properly "signed off’ on the technological mystery that is the telephone.

AT LEAST learn the most basic tenets of communicating with others before attempting to navigate the vastly complicated tool that is the telephone. How much intelligence does it take to first: gather your thoughts, determine why you’re calling and with whom you’d like to speak. Second, put these thoughts into intelligent english. In the case of the lady above, something to the effect of:

Caller: may I speak with accounting? I believe they returned my call, but they didn’t leave a message, so i’ll start with them (she would have determined this by remembering that SHE had called US first, and WHY she’d called and WHO, before she actually returned the call).

Feel free to add and share your own phone rants/pet peeves here.

2

People that call me ,and don’t leave a message on the ansewering machine ,cause they only have live conversations.

Most businesses that use the phone service , calling during normal business hours , while the rest of the world runs on a 24 hour schedule , I work second shift , please supply an email address that I can deal with your enquiry during my hours and not have you thinking I am skipping your call, cause I get it at just after midnite.

Declan

3

The previous holder of my phone number, who apparently was very selective in who she gave her new phone number to. I have had calls from the school system because her kids had unexcused absences, calls from the truant officer, from her doctor, from her kid’s doctor, from her dentist, from her opthalmologist, and my personal favorite, from the juvenile court system because they were having trouble assigning a parole officer to her eldest. Oh, also collect calls from the local prison, which we finally managed to get turned off.

4

:rolleyes:
People requesting Caller ID from the phone company should not be allowed to get it until they sign a contract (with the threat of death as punishment) promising not to call back unknown numbers asking, “Who called me from this number?”

I’m just saying…

5

How bout this one:

If I say you have the wrong number, that means hang up and dial the RIGHT FREAKIN’ NUMBER!!! It DOES NOT MEAN hit redial and** CALL THE WRONG FREAKIN’ NUMBER AGAIN!!!**

Got it?

Ok, since I’m on a wrong number rant, let me repeat a previous rant:

If I were the nasty ass greasy pizza place or the cheap gonna ruin your feet shoe store, I would answer the phone saying:

“Hello, this is the nasty ass greasy pizza place, how may I help you?”

or

“Hello, this is the cheap gonna ruin your feet shoe store, how may I help you?”

Got it? You sure? Then:

WHEN I ANSWER THE PHONE WITH JUST “HELLO” DON’T START ORDERING YOUR FREAKIN’ NASTY ASS GREAZY PIZZA OR ASK ME IF I HAVE A PAIR OF RED CHEAP GONNA RUIN YOUR FEET SLING BACK SANDALS WITH 3 INCH HEELS. INSTEAD ASK IF THIS IS WHICH EVER ONE OF THE PLACES YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE CALLING SO I CAN SAY WRONG NUMBER ,SO WE CAN BOTH GET ON WITH OUR LIVES.

OK?

Oh and then, after you hang up, look up and redial the right number instead of HITTIN’ THE FREAKIN REDIAL BUTTON AND BOTHERING ME YET AGAIN!!!

Thank you for getting a clue and not doing that YET AGAIN YOU FESTERING POSTULE ON SOCIETY’S ASS!!!

Why, yes, there are some people who do this A LOT!!! Does it show? :smiley:

6

My thing is people who get mad at me even though they screen all my calls. This is mostly my family.

I’ve been dying to record, “Thanks for calling. Please leave a message as we are trying to avoid a specific phone call. If we don’t call you back, it’s probably you.”

7

<snerk> I love it! I say do it Elenia.

And while I am here, let me add another.

If you call me on my home phone, be prepared to tell me who you are. DO NOT SAY TO ME “WHO’S SPEAKING?” WHEN I ANSWER THE PHONE!!! I WILL ASK YOU WHO (OR IS THAT WHOM) DO YOU WISH TO SPEAK WITH.

Got it? Good!

QUIT FREAKIN’ DOING IT ALL THE TIME THEN!!!

8

It would just confuse my family.

When I first got this answering machine, I listened to the pre-recorded message, thought I liked it, and left it. It was a man’s voice, and this is before my family knew I was living with my guy.

So I get a message from my aunt, in Punjabi, saying:

“This is a…man’s voice? Why is there a man there? Oh…I must have the wrong number.” Click.

it was very funny, because she sounded so confused. A MAN!

9

This reminds me of a story. Gather round kiddies.

This was about 10 years ago when I gave an answering machine to somebody as a Christmas present. She asked me to put an OGM on it, so I did. I used my standard: “Hello, you have reached, xxx-xxx-xxxx, please leave a message” in my male voice.

Her daughter called her a few days after and heard my voice. She called her husband to tell him that she had called her mother and there was a man’s voice on the answering machine. She was convinced that her mother had a man living with her. Her husband calls to hear the message, calls his wife back and says, “Ummmm, you do know that’s swamp’s voice, right?”

Ya know, put in twenty minutes of mindless filler with Lucy calling up Ethel to say there’s a man in her mother’s home and the both of them disguising themselves as repairmen to get into the mother’s home, where the wind up trapped on the ledge of mom’s 20th floor apartment, and we got us a hit sitcom! :smiley:

10

Ha ha…it *is * funny, what people will assume. Although I could totally see my family trying to break into my house!

11

Often for work I’ll call someone who’s applied for assistance through us, and leave a message along the following lines:

“Hi, this is Left Hand of Dorkness. I’m calling to let you know that we’ve approved your request for assistance. If you need to reach me, you can call me at 555-1212, but I can give you all the information you need over the phone. Blah blah blah. Yadda Yadda Yadda. Numbers, instructions, time limits. Again, if you have any questions, you can reach me at 555-1212. Thanks, and have a great day!”

All the time I get calls back like:

“Hello, Humane Society, this is Lefty.”
“Hello?”
“Hi, how can I help you?”
“Did you call me?”
“I’m not sure. What’s your name?”
“Aid Recipient.”
“Oh! Yes, I did. Hi, recipient! Did you have a question about my message?”
“Uh, message?”
“Yes, you freaking imbecile, my message.”
“I didn’t get the message. I just saw your number on my phone.”
“Why the hell do you pay for voicemail then, you pathetic fool? Listen to the goddamned message, where I gave you all the information you need! Call me back if you have any question!”
“Oh, okay, I’ll listen to it.”
“Thanks, and have a great day!”

Grrr.
Daniel

12

swampbear, have some fun with these morons who call and think you’re the pizza place or the shoe store after hitting redial. Just act like you work at whatever place they think they are calling and “take” their pizza order or go along with them and answer their questions about the shoes they want (just make shit up). I realize this isn’t fair to the businesses themselves who will have to deal with an irate customer (unless they are places you don’t like and have a valid reason to get back at them). In any case, maybe the idiots who call back again will learn after they are made to look stupid when they go pick up their pizza or their shoes.

My biggest phone/answering machine peeve: Call me once. Just once! ONE TIME! That’s all you need to do, really! Don’t call every 15 minutes! My caller ID will not only tell me that you called, but it will tell me how many times you called and when you placed all these extra calls. Trust me, I’ll call you back as soon as I can! Calling me a dozen times while I am out will not make me come home any faster! Oh, and since I have an answering machine, please, please, for the love of God, LEAVE A MESSAGE! Don’t fill up my tape (yes, it’s old, but it still works, dammit, so I ain’t replacing it until I need to!) with several consecutive blank messages! :mad:

13

I got my start being a receptionist. IT’s caused me some pet peeves about the phone.

I hate the people who call back random numbers on their caller ID.

I hate HATE HATE having this conversation:

“Hello, Widgets R US, how may I direct your call?”
“Who’s this?”
“This is the front desk, ma’am, how may I direct your call?”
“What’s your name?”
Sigh. “Obsidian.”
“Well, Obsidian, I’ve been having this problem with my widget, and blah blah blah. . .”
“I’ll transfer you to customer service.”
“Can’t you just answer my question?”
“I’m sorry, this is the front desk. I need to transfer you to customer service.”
“I’ll be on hold forever! I just need you to tell me how to blah blah blah.”

At this point, I ususally say “Hold please” and transfer the call. Some of these people would hang up and call back, determined to get me to help them.

Nowadays I catch the calls for my boss’s husband’s business when he’s out of the office (he’s a programmer and rents an office in the space her business uses). My instructions are clear. Take a message, send it to his pager. That is ALL I do. The only thing I know about his business is it’s name and that it has something to do with computers. I have the same damn problem. Only now I get sales people, too, who interpret “May I take a message?” as an opening to launch their spiel. Look, I’m just the receptionist.

I don’t understand why people are so upset that the front desk can’t answer thier questions.

14

I have two specific pet peeves:

  1. People who say their phone number so fast it makes hummingbirds dizzy. I’m not asking for four minute pauses between digits, but I’ve had messages where I had to rewind it four times, while using “6” to slow down the playback just to get the number.

B) People who don’t have “telephone number rhythm”. It’s hard to explain, but generally, there is a common, accepted, instinctive rhythm in giving your phone number.

“555… 1 2… 1 2.”

It completely throws me off when someone gives me their phone number as “5 5… 1 2 1… 2.”

III) People who ramble in their messages. “Hi uh this is Joe Blow from Kokomo. I uh, I was calling because, remember the meeting we had last week? You were there and so was that other guy… What was his name again? You know, the blond guy. Kinda nordic looking… Jennifer! Yes, Jennifer… Actually, I guess Jennifer isn’t a guy’s name, but anyway! He and I used to go to school together and we played on the varsity chess team, except we didn’t have letters because the jocks kept beating us up. So, to make a long story long (self-amused chuckle), oh wait… I have another call that I have to take right away. So I’ll, uh, I guess I’ll call back and see what your thoughts on this are.”

15

Give us a call at Car Talk. 888-CAR-TALK. That’s double two, seventy-eight, two, fifty-five.

Yeah, that causes my brain to cramp, too.

16

I got a call a few weeks ago that went thusly:

<ring>
JerH (picking up phone): Hello?
Guy on Phone: Who is this?
JerH: Uh, It’s Jer.
GOP (aside, to someone else): Do we know anyone named Jer?
GOP: Why are you calling?
JerH: You’re the one who called me!
GOP: No I didn’t - you called me!
<I hang up, to avoid having to argue with someone who apparently has only 3 seconds of short-term memory>

It only occurred to me much later that they guy must have seen an unknown number on his caller ID, then misdialed it and gotten me.

17

Wait wait wait… something like this happened to my wife the other night. She was calling an acquaintance and ended up at the wrong number. My wife apologized and hung up, thinking she pressed a wrong digit somewhere along the way.

She then dialed again, paying attention to the digits pressed, and ended up dialing the same wrong number. The person on the other end was somewhat nonplussed, but I can certainly understand that situations like this can pop up (it turned out she had incorrectly transcribed the number when she had gotten it, why she didn’t read it back I’ll never know).

That said, if some dipshit actually hit the REDIAL button, then they deserve a good reaming.

18

Thank you so much for actually saying “May I take a message”.
There are several companies I deal with who use answering services, and the service will answer the phone the same way the regular receptionist does and then get mad at you for asking them your questions, as if you should psychically know that they don’t actually work there.

Weird Useless Answering Service: “Good morning, Bob’s Quality Cupcakes!”
Me: “Hi there! Do you happen to have any chocolate cupcakes in stock today?”
WUAS (in an irritated voice): “This is just the answering service.”
Me: “Oh, could I leave a message for Bob to give me a call when he gets in?”
WUAS (more irritated now): “No, you’ll have to call back during BQC’s regular hours.”

I have no idea what purpose they serve.

I also want to second the calling-a-wrong-number-twice rationale - I’ve done that same thing, thinking I have misdialled the first time only to realize after the second wrong number that I have, well, the wrong number.

19

I’m trying to train her, but my boss will frequently leave the office for whatever reason and leave her cell phone on her desk. Someone will then try to reach her on her office phone (which I can hear from my office). Not reaching her, they will then try her cell phone (which I can also hear, as the volume is turned up all the freaking way (a rant for another day)). Obviously, she doesn’t answer that, either. They will then keep alternating numbers, every 1-2 minutes, never leaving a message. Okay, I can tell you need to get ahold of her, but calling her like that isn’t going to make her come back any faster! Geez!

Also: to whomever it is that’s trying to reach her right now: she’s not in today. If you would LISTEN to her out of office message instead of calling every 3 minutes and then hanging up, you’d know that! :mad:

20

My newly listed phone number apparently belonged to someone named Patricia who seems to have a number of friends in the collections business.

These twits always call when I am work (9-5, M-F). NEVER in the evening or on the weekends, so I have had scads of hangups from unknown out of state, hidden, and long distance numbers on my caller id and on my message machine.

These people also never leave a message with a number I can call to tell them Patricia is not at this number and QUIT CALLING ME ALREADY. I will even call these people long distance to get them to quit calling and looking for Patricia if they would leave a number BTW, on those occasions when I have received actual collections calls (in my wicked past), they always left a number and always called back in the evening and on weekends so I am at a loss why this crop just can’t get it together.

I went so far as to record my OGM to say:

“You have reached xxx-xxx-xxxx. This is the GraphicsGal residence. This number was a new listing as of (date of move). If you are calling for ANYONE other than GraphicsGal, you have reached the wrong number. No one other than GraphicsGal is reachable at this number. There is no Patricia here.”

This has not reduced my trash call volume at all.

Grrrrrrrr!