The Pink Shoe Diaries

I was leafing through a recent issue of "Entrepreneur" (when I am bored I will read anything, including but not limited to Adam's business magazines, cereal boxes, super-coups...) and came across this poll of Employee's Biggest Pet Peeves:

44% - Condescending tones
37% - Public reprimands at work
34% - Micromanaging
32% - Loud talkers
30% - Cell phone ringing
22% - Use of speakerphone in public areas
11% - Engaging in personal conversations
9% - Using PDAs during meetings.

This poll is right on the money. I think all of the above are annoying but I would change the order a bit because let me just say that the speakerphone thing is the WORST. It is at least the one I have the most experience with.

When I worked for the Evil Real Estate Agency, certain agents conducted business SOLELY over speakerphone, so we could all hear how much money they were making/what kind of business they were pulling in. And yet if I put a client on speakerphone so that I could look for the file in the cabinet next to my desk without putting them on hold, this was considered unprofessional.

When I used to work for the property management firm, one of my responsibilities was to check my boss's voicemails. Since he frequently sent me out of the office to take care of things at our properties, this ended up being an inappropriate task to give me since I was not around enough to check them as frequently as he would have liked. Still, I did my best. There were times though when I would rush into the office after spending 2 hours running his errands, plop down in my chair and no more than 1o seconds later my boss would open his office door, go back to his desk and check his voicemail on speakerphone with the volume turned up all the way, all the while sighing loudly to show how dismayed he was that he had to do this himself. One may wonder why he did not just say "Hey, when you get a chance can you check my voicemails?". One may wonder still why the task of checking his voicemails fell on me, who was out of the office at least a few hours each day rather than the receptionist who sat at the front desk without even being allowed a lunch break.

There is a reason I quit after a month. But that is neither here nor there.

Relevant to the whole speakerphone fiasco, my current office cell phone plan is with Nextel and everyone has one of those BEEP BEEP direct connect phones that they use pretty often. And sometimes when the conversations get lengthy I start to feel like the next time i hear that BEEP BEEP i will staple my own ears shut.

But I will still take an occasional BEEP BEEP over bitchy-loud-message-checking-over-the-speaker-phone jerkiness any day.