Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Voice mail: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG



Open letter to my patients:

Look. I am a mental health nurse practitioner. Unlike your primary care team, I don't have a nurse or a secretary to make phone calls for me. So it's just me, in the red headed stepchild section of your health care, calling you.

Could you please change your out going message? Yes you, the one with the voice mail that goes:

"DON'T FUCKING LEAVE A MESSAGE I GOT CALLER ID, I KNOW YOU CALLED AND I'M NOT GONNA LISTEN TO YOUR MESSAGE!"

The fact is, I need to leave a message. In fact, if you no-show our appt, I have to call you THREE times and listen to you be a jerk.

Also, could you and that other guy change the following outgoing message:

"This is ADAM. you know the drill."

and

".....(static....mumbling i don't understand.....yelling kid in the background)..."

Also- could you and your brother please try not to be funny because this:

"Hello . . . .. . . . haa haa fooled you, leave a message".

is not funny.

Allo me to repeat that.

not.funny.at.all.

Also- I appreciate that you enjoy death metal/heavy metal/ear splitting techno or loud classical baroque but having it BLARE IN MY EAR FOR THIRTY SECONDS is not pleasent. Change that please.

Lastly, consider this. Part of the problem that you are seeing me for is that you are unemployed because of your anger/depression/piss poor attitude. So think of what employers think when they get hear this outgoing message:

"YO!! IT'S LAVANDRE YO!! HOLLA AT YOUR BOY!!"

or the white trash version

"YO YO YO! IT'S MASON ALEXANDER THE THIRD BOYEE!! LEAVE A FRESH MESSAGE AT THE BEEP!!"

or just don't be white trash at all, like this guy:

"GEORGINA!! ... HOW TO YOU WORK THIS DANG GUM CELL PHONE!! (random beeps) AWW SHIT! I give up"

So, please, clean the voicemail up people. Do it for me, your friendly neighborhood NP.

Thanks a bunch!!

4 Left a message at the beep:

Mrs. Hall said...

I'm not kidding when I say the red headed step child section of health care.

My office use to be the storage closet.

in the basement.

:)

Slyde said...

oh god i HATE the people who do the "hello?" thing.....

that used to drive me up the wall when answering machines first came out in the 80's.

i think the first time i ever saw it done was in The Terminator

Bruce Johnson said...

I gave up on Voice Mail a long time ago. There once was a novelty to recording a message, but that wore off when every Tom, Dick and Harry thought they were Johnny Carson reincarnated. I just leave the standard name and leave a message thing.

I do recall once, back in the 90s, I had a phone used ONLY for data (before we all had broadband) and I had an answering machine hooked up to to it with the following message (This is a data line only, this is a non-answered phone, do not leave a message). And Sure enough, the damn line got about 5 message a week, usually something like "hello, hello....is cindy there? hello?".

Never under estimate the number of people that get it 'wrong'.

Mrs. Hall said...

Bruce: then THEN our outgoing messages have to have like 17 pieces of info like, if you're having an emergency call 911 and the suicide hotline number and gaaaah!!

luckily, I don't have my own office so HA HA AHAA I don't have voicemail, they just leave messages with the secretary!

WORD UP!!

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