At the Sound of the Tone


There have been some inventions made over the years that started out with the goal of providing good to all of mankind. Nuclear energy and gun powder would be two good examples. Despite the good these inventions can accomplish, they can be used for great evil.

There is another invention that, while possessing the potential to make our lives better, has turned into something quite wicked. I refer, of course, to voice mail. Of all the potentially valuable inventions in this century, voice mail is probably the most abused and despised. Ask most people you come across and they will tell you they really hate to have to leave messages on voice mail yet, they have it themselves and use it whenever possible.

Voice mail has become such a major part of the way some people live and work that they are completely thrown off when their calls actually get answered.

"Hello...:" a pause ... "Hello?"

"Oh, hi. Sorry, I wasn't expecting you to answer. I was going to leave you a message."

"Well, here I am. What was it you wanted?"

"Uh, well, umm...oh, it's not important. I'll call back later and leave you the message."

On the other hand, I am still used to speaking directly with people, so most of my experiences with voice mail have run pretty much like this call made back to head office:

"Hello, this is Miss Waite."
"Hi Helen, it's - "
"I'm not available to take your call right now."

I hate it when I start talking to the machine. If anyone is listening to you, they will know what you have just done and they will laugh at you. Maybe not loud enough for you to hear, but they will laugh. And later, they will tell others who, in turn, will also laugh.
"At the sound of the tone, please leave your name, phone number, the time you called, a detailed message, your license plate number, make and model of your car, your likes and dislikes and a list of your five favorite movies, and I will return your call, but only after exhausting every opportunity to dodge it. By the way, I will call back either when you are on your phone talking to someone else or during the only three minutes you happened to be out of your office all day. If you would like to speak to someone, press "0" and someone will help you."

Since I have just gone to the effort of picking up my phone and dialing the number, the chances are pretty good I actually would like to speak someone, so I invariably press the "0".

"Thank you for holding. Your call is important to us, so please stay on the line and someone will be with you shortly." OK, I'll just sit here and concentrate on who it was I was calling and why. Bad enough to have tried to talk to a machine, I don't want to embarrass myself more by getting through and then forgetting why I called in the first place.

"Thank you for holding. All of our operators are still busy. Please stay on the line and we'll get to you as soon as we can. We aren't sure when.....soon, we hope... probably within the next, oh, ... whenever." Is it me, or is that voice message giving me attitude? Must be me. Maybe my mind is wandering and I just imagined the tone. How long has it been? I could be timing this call with a calendar. I'd hang up, but I've invested so much time, I have to see it through.

Finally, the phone rings. You're startled and not quite ready.

"ThankyouforcallingtheLastMinuteGiftoftheMonthClubmynameisTammyhowmayIdirectyourcall?"

"What? Oh, uh, oh, well, uh, ...I'm sorry, did you say Last Minute Gift of the Month Club? I mean it was so fast, I wasn't sure if..."

"Yes, this is Tammy. How may I direct your call?"

"Oh, well, I was calling for Helen, but I got her voice mail and -"

"Miss Waite is away from her desk at the moment, would you like to leave her a voice mail?"

"If I had wanted to leave voice mail, I would have already done so."

"Well she is away from her desk at the moment. I can take a message for you if you like."

Where do people go when they are away from their desk, and why are we told this? Don't they think we can handle the truth? "She's in the can,"or "He's busy chatting up the secretaries" works for me. I could even handle the brutally honest, "He's on his fifteen minute break and won't be back for at least an hour." Being away from your desk would also be accurate if you were in Bermuda for the next two weeks.

While many people use voice mail for what it was intended, there are also many who simply use it as a way to screen calls and return only those they feel like returning. For those who never return the messages I leave, I am considering putting together a return message to put them on the receiving end of what they have put me through.

"Hi, this is John. I've been calling you for several weeks now and leaving messages on your voice mail. Since I haven't heard back yet, I am guessing that I am not going to hear back, so at the sound of the tone, please hang up and forget I even called. If you are curious as to why I have been taking time out of my days to repeatedly call you, please press "0" and you will be placed on the queue for my secretary, Miss Waite. That way, if you don't feel like returning the calls to me personally, you can do what I always do when I call you: go to Helen Waite."

It might make me feel better to leave a message like that, but I think it is time I realized that in life's game of telephone tag, I am almost always it.