Thursday, December 18, 2008

bad phone day

I am having the worst phone day of my life.
Let me explain.
Usually I'm pretty ok on the phone. 5 months of on-and-off secretary work will do that to you. I mean, I'm no call centre operator or anything, but most of the time I can have a conversation with any random without any awkwardness.
Until today.

Phone call one:
Jacki: Hello, Jacki speaking
Random: Hi this is Heath from harris technology, is Phillip there please?
Jacki: No he's at work, can I take a message?
Heath: This is just regarding the Lenovo notebook he dropped off to be repaired
Jacki: Uh huh
Heath: Its ready to be picked up, I just need to give Phillip some details before he comes to get it...blah blah blah (rants for like 10 minutes about some crap)
Jacki: Ok, great, thanks
- This is where it got awkward. See, I thought Heath was going to continue talking, so instead of saying 'Bye', 'See you soon', whatever, I just stayed silent. But apparently Heath was done talking. So he stayed silent.
(Massive awkward pause. I'm not even kidding. It was like 40 freaking seconds).
Ok so at this point its too weird to say anything, right? So I just had to hang up! Without even saying goodbye! I HATE doing that.
Whatever. I could get over it. This was a one time thing, right?
Right?
WRONG!

Phone call two:
Random: University of New South Wales Service Desk, this is Janet speaking, how may I help you?
Jacki: Oh, hi, I was wondering if you could help me, I forgot my online uni ID, so I just tried all these random ones and now I've been locked out of the system. (Yes, this really happened. Yes, I am an idiot. But its another story for another day.)
Janet: (Probably fighting the urge to laugh) Ok sure. What we do is, we unlock all the accounts at the same time, so I'll do that now, and you should be able to log in in about half an hour.
Jacki: Ok, cool, thanks!

....
Ok, this time I had no excuse. I mean, really. She had already said everything she needed to say. There was no way I could possibly think she was going to continue talking. And yet, once again, I stayed silent, and an awkward pause ensued.
Except this time it was even more awkward, because after the 45 seconds or whatever, she goes...
Janet: Okay...thanks...bye?
...
Bye?
Like that. Like there was a question mark after it. Like she wasnt sure if I was mentally developed enough to know how to carry a normal phone conversation, and thought I needed to be reminded that once the discussion was over, you usually say goodbye and then hang up.
And I mean, rightly so.

Sigh. Hopefully this was just a two-time thing.
But just in case, nobody call me today.

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