A healthy fear of telephones
The telephone just rang on my desk, and a wave of dread crashed across the desk. I picked it up on the second ring, and went through the usual “work greeting” that we were all told to do years ago, but nobody else seems to bother with.“Hi”And relax. My other half.
I will freely admit to sharing my view of phone calls at work with the despair.com poster (“Maybe if we don't pick the phone up, the customers will leave us alone”)although most off my ire is related to people I work with wanting something from me that they could have done themselves. It's not all the time, but it's enough that I dread picking the phone upespecially when I'm already supposed to be working on something else.
Maybe I need to start saying no a bit more often. Telling people that “yes, while I know more about that thing that you're ever probably going to know, if I help you then I'm going to let this other person down, or make myself look bad. So I'm not going to help you.“You can tell it's Friday, can't you.