Low phone days

The weekend arrives, and I sigh with relief. It is a "Low Phone Day".

I am not a telephone talker, and back in the days when I had my own company, a huge amount of business was conducted by phone. It was open seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and had clients all over the southeast.

The phone never stopped ringing. The person on the other end of the phone may want to buy something, or sell something, or report a problem. On the weekends and at night, it went to an answering service first, and to a pager. But when that phone rang, somebody had to do something. If nobody else was working right then, or if they got stumped by the request, the next person to try and face the peril was.... me. The buck stopped with me. In the beginning, the buck started with me too. When there are two or three people in a company, and it is in 24 hour operations, you pull a lot of shifts. It is best illustrated by the following scenario:

Someone calls up, demanding immediate resolution of a problem. It is 10 pm on a Saturday night, and I am on call. I take the call, and try to sort out the problem. I realize that the problem is not going to resolve that night, or worse, the problem has nothing to do with my company's service. Said caller is informed of that fact. They react with a sense of righteous indignation and demand to talk to my supervisor....

If they were nasty to me, I'd put my husband on the phone. He has a special telephone voice for people who are nasty to his wife. The calls ended pretty quick in those situations. If they were not nasty, I'd inform them that the supervisor was already on the phone... and hope that they didn't ask for the president of the company.

All these phone calls, although they were years ago, have bent my nervous system. I literally detest answering a phone. I also have Spiderman Spidey Sense when it comes to the voice on the other end of the line. If you are trying to sell me something, I know this instantaneously, and the salesman defense grid activates. I have no control over it. There is nothing you can say to me on the phone that will get me to buy something, or disclose the name of the person who actually has purchasing authority. And Please Don't Ask To Talk To My Husband. Because I might let you talk to him.

So, Low Phone Days... As my company grew, I got some salespeople. They started taking some of the calls, and they also had to make calls. A lot of calls. I was not just the Customer Service Supervisor, I was the Sales Manager too. A pretty hard one, as I recall. Unlike most places, salesmen in my operation were usually working on the weekend, trying to get their paperwork in order, etc. The one thing they didn't have to do was make calls. One Friday, as we were closing up shop, one mused "Ah, the Weekend..."

The guy at the desk next to him, in Customer Care, was unimpressed. "So What..? We work Saturday too."

The salesguy smiled, "Yes, but for me, at least Saturdays are 'Low Phone Days'."