kiya

(No, not a political one.)

Because I've been having a number of different home projects going on lately, I've been answering the phone more often than usual. My normal routine is that if I don't recognize a caller ID, I let it go to voicemail. The fact that 99.99% of such calls don't bother to leave a voicemail tells me I haven't missed anything important.

But when I might be getting a call from my solar contractor, or city inspection, or the refrigerator repair, or that sort of thing, I loosen up to answering anything that doesn't explicitly say "probable spam." So I'm answering a lot of spam/sales calls.

There's this pattern. I say hello. There's a lengthy silence. The person on the other end says hello. Then another lengthy silence. Maybe eventually they say hello again or ask if I'm there.

To expend some of my frustration, I've taken to using the following script during the second lengthy silence.

"Proper phone etiquette is that you state your name, you state the organization you're calling for, you indicate the purpose of your call, then you confirm the identity of the party you're speaking to. Can you do that?"

Sometimes I get the start of their standard script (at which I break in and once again ask for the name of their organization and the purpose of the call). Sometimes they just hang up. Now that I'm not expecting any further business phone calls, I'll try to retrain my reflexes to hit "do not accept" and see if they leave voicemail. But in the mean time I get some small satisfaction in carrying the banner for old-fashioned phone etiquette. (And one of these days I'll spell "etiquette" correctly the first time.)