Repitition

I infinitely prefer getting emails over voice mails. Mostly because we don't have any sort of visual voicemail system here, so I have to transcribe voicemails into a to-do list manually. But also working with people around the nation means there are a lot of accents. I respectfully request that anyone who needs my assistance to send an email along with any voicemail (unless email isn't working). Finally, 90% of people who call me assume I know them by voice and leave neither identity or a way to contact them.

But for some people it's because they're completely incapable of leaving an intelligible message. These people will find that I will never pick up the phone when they call. Here is a manual trasncript (anonymous and devoid of corporate content) of the only message I could figure out from one in particular.

"It's, LADY at LOCATION, give me a call and we're getting ready to switch over a phone for DUDE and I need to have you call him. He's going to (unintelligible murmur) phone for a new phone and he's gonna need to have that security. Whatever is from security today and Today Today Today Today is so. Can you call him at xxx-xxx? Yeah, with that, but he's going to the telephone companies shop, right now as we speak. So it's something to do with Blackberry, call me. Thank you. Bye."

The number of x's I wrote for the phone number is not a typo. The woman left me six numbers. SIX! Thankfully part of that message was apparently saying that the guy already called another person in our IT department and it had been handled without my intervention.

Either way, if you're going to leave a message asking for any sort of help or a call back. The proper way is: Name, Phone number, problem.