Pet Hate of the Day

I've got a pet hate for the day, when I message anyone, before, during and after I try my utmost to get their name right, on the phone that's hard sometimes you ask them to spell it, or you look them up on the company website, or websites.

E-mail makes this easier, when someone has already contacted you, or there's an internal company address book you have their name right there, right in front of you...

Bob, might very well e-mail you, but you can see they're Robert... Stewy might send you a meeting invite, but you know he's Steven...

So why the fuck is it that my name, Jonathan, gets totally garbled... I mail and talk to people as Jon, I just sent a mail and signed it off "Jon".  That's permission for the other end to engage me as "Jon"... So when I get "Jonathon", "Johnathan", "Johnathon", "John" or even "Jonefan" it winds me the fuck up.

You have my name, you have how I've presented it to you, I'm not so mental that I don't know how to spell my own name, grrrrr

Story Time - No Answer Phone

It has been a year since I disabled my mobile's voice message service, the reasons I had to take this drastic action was my mother who would persist on calling me and leaving 5 messages each of 10 minutes length which I neither wanted nor listened to, but which she would spread out with little glimpses of important information within.... They were a little like having to listen to the entire X-Factor coverage last Saturday night just to hear Simon Cowell read out the lottery numbers which would win the following weekend.

Anyway, this does leave a bit of a gap when people call me and expect to just leave me a message, they either get me, or they don't and I've even been asked if my number is a mobile... "It is"... "But you haveno voice mail"... "I turned it off, so you either get me or you don't".

It makes for interesting changes to people communicating with me, notably currently selling a house agents call to arrange a viewing, they either speak to me or don't.

I just called one such lass back "I'll call and leave you a message"... Ah, no you won't ducky.

Doing without an answer phone however, you'd not think it affects you... To me it makes no difference, I was born before anyone had answer machines, companies were either open or closed, they had ladies in nice dresses with immaculate reciprocated pronunciation to take your call, or those ladies were at home.

But today's world with the internet, messaging, with answer phones, everyone is always on the go, they've given up on face-to-face communication, hence the success of Facebook and Twitter... But now people are doing away with the skill of actually talking, they are happy to just leave a message.

I don't want a message, I want to hear from you, if you can't tell me I don't know, if I don't know it don't happen... And this isn't self-inflation, I don't think the world revolves around me, but I do at least know when, how and what people are trying to do with my valuable time.

Rather than people popping in and out of my cast of life characters thinking they've let me know what's going on via voice mail.