Slacker tip #12 - Phone? what phone?
In the daily quest to be a slacker the obstacles are numerous. Possibly the most annoying obstacle in the quest to do absolutely nothing and get paid for it is the phone that sits on your desk. Thanks to that little cursed contraption your co-workers can call you, customers can call you, people with the wrong number can call you - and it really messes up a good game of Free Cell when you have to stop and answer the phone. Bastards.
Are you reading a particulary engaging piece of Ginny & Hermione fan fiction on FanFiction.net and don’t want to be interrupted? I thought you might be, because honestly, who doesn’t want to read that? That’s why I have some tips on eliminating irritating phone calls at your desk.
Now, if you work in a call center, do not think for a minute that any of this will work. It will just work in getting your ass fired - remember, your boss listens in on your calls at the call center. But if you work in an office like me, these are sure to work.
1. Leave the phone off the hook. An easy way to get away with this is to have something (bag, purse, backpack, lunch bag) sitting directly beside the receiver. This way, if you get caught with the phone off the hook you can say ‘oh, my bag/purse/whatever must have knocked the receiver off when I sat it down there, oops’ and the best part is - they will buy it. It’s so simple, yet so effective.
2. Unplug the phone cord from the phone, but leave it sitting in the connection place. Why? Beacuse then it will look like it just came loose. Otherwise, it will be painfully obvious that you just unplugged it.
3. Try turning the ringer off. Now, from past experience I know that this will not work on all office phones. Some of those cheeky bastards have made it impossible to turn the ringers off. Also, some phones won’t allow you to change the volume on the ringer until the phone is actually ringing. For this, I suggesting using your cell phone to call your desk phone so you can turn it down.
4. The dreaded voicemail blinky light. While you might be successful in making your phone not ring all day, you will probably end up with a lot of voicemail messages. Depending on which method you have used to stop the phone calls, you might end up with a blinking voicemail light on your phone. And if a boss sees that, they are bound to ‘remind’ you to check your voicemails. To keep this from happening, I keep a paper with important info or maybe just a company phone list tacked to my cubicle wall directly above my phone. I put it up so that is hangs at an angle where the bottom corner of the paper covers up the voicemail blinky light. Now, I have put all the papers that are on my cubicle wall up in a haphazard manner so that the one above the phone is not the only one that isn’t tacked up all nice and neat.
And, a final thought on phone calls….If you work at a place where you have to send things out to customers with your name & phone number on it - do NOT put your actual phone number. Use a co-workers or a totally incorrect number for that matter.
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