I remember the day vividly. The day our company decided to upgrade our phone system to incorporate a “page” feature. What at first was a novel convenience for our “Donut Guy” to serenade us with a poem about donuts on Friday when he brought them in for all of us, has become a annoying curse that has blighted my ears far too often..
People have become addicted to it.. It’s like: “we have the feature so now we have to use it!”
In the 8 years that we have had the “page feature” I have identified and categorized the abusers:
1) The Delilah/Kacey Kacem: You know how Kasey Kacem has a style and delivery of narrative? Well these are the people who suddenly hit the page button and it’s “Here’s a long distance dedication for “so and so” to come to the (insert conference room name here.)” Please stop your voice and narrative is not that good.
2) Lazy man/woman #1: They refuse to look at and/or even print an extension list.. So thus, rather than call the person directly they page them… Please stop…
3) Lazy man/woman #2: Rather than get their fat ass off the desk chair they are sitting on and walk to the person and/or find the person they then of course revert to Lazy man/woman #1. Seriously, get off your f’ing ass!
4) The deflector: These are the people who give the receptionist a bad name.. You call the deflector and they look at caller ID and say no way am I talking to the customer so the receptionist now has to page the deflector…. Hey I got an idea; Talk to our f’ing customer and make them f’ing happy and maybe just maybe our new contract bid will be accepted!
5) Self Important Regress: This person starts off as “Hey I’m very important and I just thought of a stupid useless time wasting question that I need (insert his underling’s name here) to answer.” and boom! They regress to either Lazy man/woman #1 and/or #2… Seriously, stupid questions are for e-mail so we can document your stupidity..
6) Impatient Regress #1: Oh this is the one that gets to me… They are very close to “Self Important” they get their question and or info and they sometimes, albeit rarely, call their person they need/want, The person might just at that moment might be on the can coaxing a turtle head to come all the way out and they immediately regress to Lazy Man/Woman #1 and/or #2.. Come on is it really that important you cannot wait 5-10 minutes and try calling them again?
7) Impatient Regress #2: If you thought Impatient Regress #1 was annoying? They regress immediately to Lazy man/woman #1 and/or #2, they page the person they need/want and less than 1 minute later they page again… Then 1 minute later they are paging yet again, sometimes as a bonus they then page the person’s supervisor. Seriously? WTF?
If you think I’m annoyed by all these “pagings” you are correct. And I’m not alone. One employee here got so annoyed about the situation he actually used epoxy on a piece of slate to cover the speaker on his phone so he did not have to hear all these pages… Never mind that he has now permanently disabled the “speaker phone” ability on his phone but think about it. To be that desperate.. Ironically at the time that he did it I really did not think the “pages” were as bad as they are now…
The thing is; I’m starting to think like these people… I catch myself sometimes in “mid page” doing exactly what these f’tards are doing…
Pages can be very distracting.. At one point yesterday the receptionist and others paged 12 people in 15 minutes… That’s almost a page a minute! Am I the only one who gets annoyed by this?