on Telephone Etiquette
At work we have to share a common telephone [extension number] between people in the same cubicle. This is due to the company’s policy of getting people to ‘relate’ to each other (You know, when you say, “Oh you want Susan’s number, here take mine, I’ll connect you to her whenever you want” :-) ).
Absurd humor apart, of late there have been a spate of funny incidences because of this (seemingly un-comprehendible?) setup, since our callers somehow believe that the person who picks up their call is a) either the very person they intended to call up (talk about pot-luck!) OR b) the telephone operator in the cubicle, who’s only job is to wait for their call and hand it over to the right person; or so it seems, since many of them just seem to call up and say ‘Smith!’ or ‘Hi Smith!’, and expect the person picking up the phone to dutifully, without asking any questions, hand over the phone to good ol’ boy Smith and he’ll take it from there. At times if I pick up the phone —yes one of the two telephones sits on my desk… (privileged?)— and even so as make the (intimidating?) mistake of asking who the caller on the other side is, they forget all they had to say and start blabbering gibberish (quite literally) as if someone forgot to write the lines they had to say after I had said mine…
Fathom this, just this morning someone called up:-
Caller: Hi is this Mr XYZ?
Abd elAzeez.: No THIS isn’t, but let me hand it (the phone) over to him.
Caller: OK… err… thank you… will I ask you to call him when he’s back… err… [Click]
[Note: There are no typos in that dialogue]
Now did he, the caller, think that this was Mr. XYZ’s hotline number or something, or did he just forget the reason that he had called up for after that (witty) one line of mine? Well I guess we’ll never know; but I sure couldn’t help laughing loud in my mind, as I decided to give up looking for the answers... And it was only after those moments of ROTFLing -in-my-head subsided, that I realized Mr. XYZ had left the organization just two days ago[sheesh!].
Besides, there is no Smith in our cubicle too, none yet in the organization as well.
—Abd elAzeez
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The copyrighted [mini?] series titled Abd's takes, is a collection of humorous blog posts comprising of completely original but wierd/ obnoxious/ unfathomable/ and seldom-light-hearted tid-bits of humor that are a product of my own twisted mind.
Feel free to use them where-ever you want to, just don't forget to 'quote the author' (in simpler terms, mention me!)
If you don't, then bad things might happen to you; things like forgetting the punch-line when in the middle of an elaborately told joke, or meeting an audience-member who knows the answers to all of your original 'amusing-riddles'.
:-]
