Recently, I escaped from the cubicle farm after seven years working as a human resources coordinator and started working from home. This has wrought many changes in my life, not least the fact that my social skills vanished in a month, but by far the greatest is the phone, which is blissfully, endlessly silent.
Here are the five phone calls that probably take a year off your life, every time you get them. I know they helped shorten mine.
5) The Sales Call
One of these days, sales departments will eventually figure out that for every sale they make over the phone, there are one hundred low level drones taking their calls who really want to do nothing more than tell them to burn in hell for wasting their time and trying to get the name of somebody else to annoy.
To be fair, the guy on the other end is just doing his job: salesmen can be required to make up to 150 cold calls, all day, every day. It’s not his fault: he has to throw strangers into an ax-murdering rage because otherwise he isn’t going to get his sales commission. Still, you’d think companies would learn that making people want to ax-murder their salesmen probably doesn’t do much for their reputation in the long run. It certainly reduces the customer base.
"Mm-hmm, go on. I'm listening."