Awww, Phone, Yip Yip Yip Yip

One of the many important things I was doing while I was away from my blog was dealing with the departure of my long time secretary (and friend) at work. She left for greener ($$$) pastures and I was left picking up the pieces. Having a good (okay, great) secretary means you don't have to worry about a myriad of things like, "Where's this get filed?" "How does this get paid?" "How do you put out this fire?"

In short, you become something of a helpless little work baybee. Working in a field such as biomedical research doesn't exactly simplfy matters either, but it wasn't the complicated stuff that tripped me up, it was the little stuff.

One of the worst things about the whole ordeal (and there were many) was her phone, the main office number, was forwarded to me. Great, the general public calling me on my fancy shamancy Nortel phone which has lots of buttons which are a mystery to me. One day it went like this:

"Hello"

"Yes, may I speak with Dr. (Blank)?"

"I'm sorry, he's not in the office at the moment, can I take a message?"

"Oh, well, could you transfer me to his voicemail?"

(pause, long pause)

"Um yeah, I'm real sure I don't know how to do that."

(laughter)

"...but I do have a pen and paper and I know how to write"

(laughter)

"Ok my name is (blank) and he can reach me at (blank)"

Figuring out that damn phone looked a little something like this: