Thursday, March 4, 2010

T&Telephone etiquette and lack thereof

One word of graffiti on exterior of an old house a friend lives in
*
In Trinidad, whenever I'm leaving my name with someone over the phone, they tend to say something like "Eh?" or "Wazz dat?" or "Spell it?" I then have to pronounce and spell it a few times before they get it.

So whenever I say: "I'd like to leave a message for so-and-so. Please tell him/her that Elspeth called" ... and the person just says "Okay", I'm pretty sure they are not going to deliver any message because they didn't get the name.

Recently this happened. I left my name for someone to call me back and the man on the other end said without hesitation: "Yeah. Ah go tell him."

Me (knowing he didn't get the name): Did you get my name?

Him: Eh heh, Yuh ent jes tell me it?

Long story short, he didn't get my name, and even though he had been saying "eh heh" when I was calling out my numbers, he wasn't writing them down because he didn't have a pen. He eventually went and got one, but the person still never got the message (which I found out when I called back later).

Today, similarly, I called to get information from a particular organisation. Again, after saying "Please tell xxxx to call Elspeth Duncan", I was met with a dry "Yeah". There was no "what was that?" and not even a pause to indicate that he was scribbling the name onto a piece of paper. There was only silence. When I said "Hello?" thinking the call had dropped, the response was a dry "Yeah". Anything I said to this person was met with a dry "Yeah".

A short while after, I called another organisation in search of the information. The female operator was very pleasant. I had cause to call back when a transfer from the office she sent my call to dropped. Again, she was very pleasant and helpful. Before hanging up, I told her that I think she's very pleasant and helpful and that it was refreshing dealing with her, especially after having encountered such poor telephone etiquette as of late.

She laughed and said "Thank you, lovey!"

2 comments:

Lynn Cohen said...

How frustrating. I'd rather tell them to please hang up and let me call back and leave a message on the machine (hopefully they have answering machine.) lovey! LOL

Anonymous said...

Arghhh!