This is an open letter to people I work with who call me on the telephone. You know who you are.

Our office has an excellent voice communications system. It was engineered by Cisco, a fine company, and it is world-class in every way. The equipment is easy to use and it integrates well with our mail system and user directory.

Yes, we have a fine telephone system. Please do not use it.

Here's the thing: when you call me on the telephone, you are essentially telling me that your time is more important than mine. A telephone call, if it is to be answered, must be dealt with immediately. If I don't answer it in four rings, I'll miss it. I have four rings worth of time to stop what I am doing and prepare my brain for something else. I do not do this easily. It is presumptuous to assume that I will not be inconvenienced by answering your phone call. And generally, I won't answer.

So then you leave me a voice mail. Which is understandable; that is, after all, what you do when you call someone and they don't answer. But this is also inconvenient for me. I have to dial in to the voice mail system, retrieve your message, listen to it, and write down what it says. This takes a considerable amount of time, but it is necessary if I want to deal with your message on my own time.

Now that I have listened to your message, I would really, really appreciate it if it actually said what you wanted. No, "a call back" is not a valid option. For me to call you back is not what you want. What you want is for me to do something, or possibly for me to answer a question for you. You see, there's a payload involved. When you say your name, and then "give me a call back," and then your phone number, you have neglected to include the payload. I can tell that you want to talk to me, because you called. I know what your name and phone number are, because of our excellent phone system. You have provided me with no information whatsoever.

Worse, it is now incumbent upon me to answer you by telephone. When I call you, I will be completely unprepared. I will have had no time to think, research, discuss, or delegate your question or request. If you had included the payload, I would be able to reply quickly and efficiently. Most likely, however, I will need to get back with you once I've divined your motives, which necessitates another phone call. So you begin to see the problem.

If you are one of the fine people who leaves informative, detailed voice mails, thank you. It's not perfect, but it does eliminate some steps in the process.

While I speak with you on the telephone, I will be writing things down. I will write down your name and the date. I will write down your question or request along with any supporting information you provide. I will write down possible answers or solutions as I think of them. If I do not write things down, I will not have a record of what was said. See how that works?

I find this whole process very awkward and inefficient. In fact, I'd say our office is crying out for a system in which you would instantly convey your wants or needs to the sender, who would be able to respond in his or her own time frame, possibly after doing whatever research was required to address the original message. It would be great if it could be transcribed into text automatically, and perhaps even filed according to date and the sender's name. What if subsequent communications could somehow be associated with each other, thus forming a sort of record of the discussions that took place?

Oh wait, we do have that. Email, if it is available, is superior to the telephone in nearly every way. Its only shortcoming, which is a distinct inability to express a lighthearted tone, has long been addressed by the emoticon, which was discovered by Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg in 1453 when he accidentally dropped a tray of punctuation.

I'd even go far as to say that those who send me email may well receive a higher level of service than those who attempt to contact me by phone. I'll usually look at your email quickly and decide what to do; easy ones will get a quick response, and the others get done in a day or so. I tend to let a few voice mails pile up before I listen to them, simply because it's more trouble. I don't like doing it at all, but obviously they can't be completely ignored. Rest assured that I'm not avoiding you out of spite.

At least not entirely.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.