No One Calls Me Anymore . . .

[Wendy]

Jumping in a bit late on this . . . 

> Cindy:
> 
> >Wow! Kathy can ignore a ringing telephone! She must be made of
> *granite!* ;-)
> 
> For me, an unanswered phone is right up there with an alarm clock 
no
> one will turn off. Makes me homicidal, it does.<

Wendy: 

Heh heh  . . . I am capable of ignoring the telephone. I am one of 
those people who mostly hates the telephone anyway, even when 
someone I like is calling. It just feels intrusive to be pulled away 
from whatever I'm doing at someone else's whim. Which is why I 
trained myself to ignore the phone if I'm not in the mood to talk. 
I'd actually started being snippy with people who called me 
(friends, I mean) and then I realized it wasn't their fault I was 
being inconvenienced. They called, but I was the one who chose to 
answer the darned thing. So, I stopped answering and life actually 
did become better. :-)

Lately, however, my five-year-old is not able to ignore it, and 
always runs to grab it. Sometimes he actually answers it, sometimes 
he brings it to me. So I have to talk more often now, but at least I 
didn't have to get up off my rear to answer the thing. <g> 

Sandy:
 
> >As for customer service--I have done it for twenty years in 
several
> capacities and several cities around the country. People on both
> sides of the counter deserve courtesy. However--telemarketers in no
> way provide customer service; one must first be a customer in order
> to be "served." And a great many telemarketers go through extensive
> training in manipulative sales techniques. The schemes are 
predatory,
> in more ways than one.


Wendy:

I agree completely with this (and I, too, have been on the recieving 
end of a few really rude telemarketers, which can make it more 
difficult to be friendly to those who follow). I do understand that 
this is a way some people choose to make a living, but that doesn't 
mean that I have to appreciate their intrusion into my life. 

Although I wonder just how much longer there will even be 
telemarketers . . . lately, I've been getting computerized calls. 
The phone rings, and a recorded voice tells me, "Hello! This is a 
very important call. Please hold," or some such nonsense. HELLO? A 
recording calls me and tells me to hold? Erm, I don't think so. I 
assume that if I had held (has anyone actually done this? Maybe I 
really won the lottery or something and missed it <g>), eventually a 
real person would have come on the line. But maybe soon it will just 
all be computers. Well, they're welcome to talk to my answering 
machine as long as they like. <g>

I will say that this computer thing is a big improvement as far as 
I'm concerned . . . it is *so* easy to hang up on the recording 
asking me to hold. <g>

Wendy