Telephony is hard

In the course of my working day, what with me being a lowly office worker, I am obliged to answer the telephone at my side when it has the temerity to ring aloud. Given how softly spoken I am, and how unimpressed I am at interacting with the world, this can be a bit of a challenge.

Today, today I excelled myself, I really did.

We have, where I work, a script for when one answers the 'phone. This is fairly standard amongst companies and, like most companies, we do not have a complicated script. No having to remember an entire soliloquy for the workers at my place of employ, oh no, not for us. The script ends, after giving our respective names, with a friendly "how can I help you?" This is an excellent way to make someone feel welcome but it is something with which many of my colleagues have struggled.

A lot of people end with "how can I help?"

This is not a major problem in the grand scheme of things. It is, after all, still a friendly invocation of the matter in hand. But it is not what our employer wants us to say and, as they're paying us, at least in part, to say "you" at the end of the script, I feel it remiss of me to not do so. For the months since we obtained our new 'phone system I did not once fail to say "you" at the end of my script. I was, I think it safe to say, a bad "you"sayin' motherfucker. Until today.

Today while working on a spreadsheet and deleting certain selections from said spreadsheet I answered my 'phone but on this occasion I made the mistake of deleting something I didn't want to delete. this distracted me so much that I was too busy correcting the deletion (thank you 'undo' button) to get around to saying "you". This would not have been so bad had I not realised this mistake, started to say "you" a few seconds after it should have been said, realised that this was now a waste of time and instead settled for what I normally say in such situations.

"Oh, fuck."

This was not what I really wanted to say while I was on the 'phone as, while I must admit I have not checked, I believe that my employer would probably rather that I did not say "oh, fuck" to suppliers who are chasing payment of their invoices (or anyone else for that matter). I realised that I had said "oh, fuck" to a supplier who was chasing payment for their invoices, that this was a bad thing, and as this hit me I started to say "shit". I managed to stop myself at the "sh..." part but was still struggling to get a grip on proceedings. Visions of The Blues Brothers being beaten with a ruler for swearing, and this causing more swearing, did little to help me to focus.

Thankfully, due to my aforementioned softly spoken ways, the person at the other end of the 'phone was happily talking about wanting to speak to my colleague about her invoice so I think I got away with it.

I am not very good at this 'life' malarkey.