It’s a busy time of it at work right now. It’s never quiet but for various reasons right now it’s so busy I’m starting to think I’ve slipped through some kind of dimensional tear and ended up in a West Wing universe where constant calls, emails and meetings conducted on the fly are the order of the day. The only things that are missing are the nice offices and Martin Sheen doing a good line in cool quotes and tough looks off camera.
That said, I never realised quite how busy things had got until yesterday when, just before the building closed, I checked my answerphone to be told by the electronic voice that I had “One…hundred…new messages.” That’ll teach me to let my voicemail catch my calls for a couple of days while I work through my email backlog, huh?
The story gets stranger this morning. After screwing up my courage and logging into my voicemail account, the electronic voice (think of a female version of Stephen Hawking and you’re just about there) says “You have…ninety…eight new messages.” What happened to the other two? Did the answerphone call them back? Did the cleaner, bored with her duties, decide to have a go? Do I have a voicemail guardian angel? Has some freak quirk in the system routed them somewhere else, leaving some poor sap in Venezuela to wonder what these people on his phone want? Or, more likely, have the two messages fallen forever into electronic limbo?
I mean, this system is surely the ultimate in design to combat workplace stress. Too many messages? Don’t worry kid, I’ll knock some off the top for ya. If this has been an accident on the system’s part then fine, I can live with that, but if this is a feature someone built in then they’re going to be a fucking millionaire before they’re 30, believe me.
January 30th, 2006 at 4:20 am
Wow, that’s a lot of calls. I deal with people at work primarily through e-mail, and try to keep the unread messages between 20-30 if at all possible. Most of the time the unread ones have been read, but I leave them bold until I respond or take care of the request within. When I take a day off, I might find 100 e-mails, but some of that is spam that got through. I’ve never had more than 2 or 3 voicemails. I think my coworkers know that I’m just not a phone guy, or the way our creative team works e-mail is better since I’m only one of many people that need the information being sent out.