Office Annoyances

There is one huge thing I hate in many offices. A lot of people have their phone systems set up so that if you dial an internal extension, instead of the phone just ringing until whomever you called picks it up, it rings once and then immediately puts the caller on speakerphone with that office.

I will accept that this may be useful in the secretary/executive context. I would argue, though, that in nearly every other context it is just completely annoying both for the caller and the called.

First, for the caller. Nothing worse than dialing, hearing it ring once, and then having absolutely no feedback as to whether or not there's someone on the other end of the line. So you invariably end up saying something like "Hello?" (which, of course, since it's on speakerphone, everyone in a three-state radius of the person you're calling can hear).

Then there's the called party... often when you're busy on important stuff, you may want to say "let him go to voicemail" or "oh, that's the boss, I should answer it" or "oh, that's the call from the vendor I'm waiting for". When the first person to reach you goes to the speakerphone, you can't pretend not to be in your office, unless you suddenly go all quick-quiet like on a nuclear missile sub or something.

Thankfully, I've had the TelcoGuy configure my phone to no longer be in using the annoying as hell configuration, but ideally, I'd love to get every phone in the building reconfigured this way, or at the very least have the phone system offer the caller the option of "if you're just going to dump me into speakerphone with no feedback, don't bother connecting me to their extension" so that I don't sound like a moron to everyone within 30' of the desk of the person I'm calling.