‘Call Rude’ Shows How You Rate
The telephone rings and foolishly I answer it. I presume it’s someone who wants to talk to me since, after all, they called me. About two minutes into the conversation I hear a familiar click break into the conversation. The person who called to update me on their gallstones says in a breathy rush, “Hold on a minute. I’ve got another call. It could be someone important.”
Yes, I think. Ed McMahon with the sweepstakes money, Hollywood with the contract, or maybe another phone company with more great options to bring us even closer to communication meltdown.
We have a name for it at our house: Call Rude. It’s the ability to put one person on hold, check out their competition on the other line, weigh your options, then pick your favorite. It’s a little like dating two people at the same time. Nice work if you’re the one doing the picking, not so nice if you’re the one being dumped.
Call Rude is just one of the many services offered to phone owners. The list of services and carriers grows daily, as does the number of phone calls made to advertise them. These strategically placed phone calls come at exactly the same time that the colicky baby finally falls asleep, the pasta water finally boils, or the person who has just finished working a 12-hour day settles into his recliner for some serious snoozing.
The salespeople are always aggressively perky, like Barbie on speed. They all start out with some variation of “Hey, sir or madam of the house, how are ya doin’ on this super fine day?” This is the clue that you should hang up immediately. Anyone who talks like this is clearly insane or selling something. Either way, you don’t want to know them.
But most of us don’t hang up. We politely listen, waiting for them to take a breath. They don’t. At the end of the monologue they ask to confirm our billing address so they can get us hooked up with those services right away. The guy in the recliner doesn’t stand a chance.
Of all the important services offered, Name That Caller is the absolute best - the phone company’s version of the television remote. It even comes with its own tiny display screen.
Now we can surf our calls, find out who called us, avoid those we don’t want to talk to, leave crabby messages for people when we know they aren’t home, and block the block that was unblocked by our last unknown name, unknown number.
Sure, it’s powerful, but we’re still going to end up talking to those people who sell garbage bags and jumbo family portraits. Their calls are never blocked and show up on the display as some version of You May Have Just Won A Million Dollars.
We can now leave messages for the entire world without ever actually having to talk to anyone. Which is a good thing because even if we want to talk they don’t want to listen. This is precisely the reasoning behind voicemail: Leave the message and leave me alone.
The anonymity of voicemail and its hick cousin, the home answering machine, can make mice roar. People who normally apologize for breathing too loudly can bark messages into a machine with confidence. The likelihood of getting a return call are practically nil. Unless, of course, those jumbo portraits are ready for pick-up.
The options of voicemail are truly amazing. You can spend many happy hours listening to your choices, or stay on the line and wait for the next available operator. Since there is generally only one operator available and that person is on the line to their chiropractor, your chances of talking to that person are roughly the same as talking to Ed McMahon. Well, OK, maybe a little worse.
By the way, if you still have a rotary phone, consider yourself dead. But if you’d like to make a call, just hang up and try again.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Kathleen Corkery Spencer The Spokesman-Review