Caller IDiot
Fun fact of the day: did you know that there are more people in the world who have access to a mobile phone than a toilet?
However, my source is not very reliable, so this fun fact may be full of crap.
More often than I should admit, I ponder the evolution of the telephone. Not the advancement of technology or the fact that phones were once cemented to a wall and now they’re cemented to our hands but the evolution of how to let out anger using a phone.
People growing up today will never feel the satisfaction of slamming the phone down when hanging up on someone.
We were lucky to have a landline where we could bang the handset as a non-verbal way of expressing anger (in case our verbal way of expressing anger wasn’t cutting it).
Then we evolved to cordless landlines where the aggressive push of button to end a call didn’t quite give the same energy. But not to worry, we were still able to forcefully place the phone back onto the tabletop base.
Furthermore, throughout the development of mobile phones, we were gifted the flip phone. This provided us with the opportunity to violently flip the phone shut to end the call.
The person on the other end wouldn’t hear the aggression in the flip, but they’d feel it.
Nowadays, we can only convey anger ending a call by pressing the “end call” button firmly and abruptly. Additionally, we do have the option of throwing our phone across a room or into a wall but all this does is cause a broken screen and it may not even end the call.
I will say, I very rarely feel this kind of anger during a phone call. Firstly, because I very rarely feel angry (I’m more of a crier) and secondly, I don’t talk on the phone often.
So it is a bit odd that I think about this as frequently as I do and it’s also a bit odd how I answered the phone the other day…
In Paint by Backside, I backed into a freshly painted wall. Today, I backed myself into a corner.
For far too long now, our phone lines at work have been similar to some women during their menstrual cycle – moody, indecisive, unpredictable and silent. Calls will drop, the phone will continue to ring even after the handset is lifted and the dial tone will be nonexistent.
The unreliable phones have caused ongoing frustrations when trying to communicate with care staff, returning a call to distressed family members and when trying to call my co-recreation therapist about every minor inconvenience in my day. Like when I tried to call her about my latest mishap.
It was well into the morning when my office phone rang. I glanced over to see that it was the receptionist calling. I didn’t want to lose my train of thought, so I picked up the phone while still typing.
As we all may know, multi-tasks also means multi-errors.
I answered the phone with a chipper, unprofessional, yet confident, “HELLLOOO.”
To my surprise an older man responded, “uh.. hi? hellooo? Is this Rachelle?”
This would have been a perfect time for the call to drop.
Since I hadn’t look at the phone again before answering, I didn’t realize that the call was a transfer from reception and not the receptionist calling.
As soon as my voice came down a couple octaves, I apologized to the man without an explanation as I wanted to move on from this embarrassing moment as fast as humanly possible.
He began to laugh and reassured me that he enjoyed the unexpected greeting. However, because of the tone of my “hello” he initially wasn’t sure who he was speaking to.
He then got right to business asking when he could return to entertain our residents. I was flustered by this point and ended up booking him later this year on a date that we already have another event planned. So I now need to call him back and hopefully will be more professional this time.
This particular interaction didn’t make me want to slam the handset down but it did make me want to slam the handset into my head.
