Venomous Voicemail

Don’t you just cringe when you call someone on the phone and their voicemail greeting is: “Hi, this is So-and-so. Sorry I can’t take your call right now. I’m either on the phone or away from my desk.”

(Well, DUHHHHHHHHHHHH! It has to be one of the two!)

My dream voice mail greeting (that would get me fired) would be something like this:

Hi, this is Corey. I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but please leave a message and I’ll return your call when I’m good and ready, AND only if I think you’re worth my time.

If you have a question about someone else’s calendar, then please call them directly. What do I look like, a crystal ball? If you are a cold-calling vendor and want to sell something to our company, then just hang up right now; we don’t have the budget. If you wanna know about job postings, we don’t have any. If you only speak Spanish - sorry I don’t. So, ‘por espanol para una numero dos’ won’t do you any good, and stop pressing that #2 key already. If you need directions to our office, Google it. Don’t you know that’s what the Internet is for? If you’re calling to ask me to help you solve a problem, I know that if I don’t return your call within the next few hours, you will eventually solve the problem yourself. So why bother leaving a message.

Thank you, and have a nice day.

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!

Postmortem Pot Luck

I live in Atlanta.

I work in an office full of women.
I live in Atlanta and work in an office full of women who like to cook.
(And so do I)

Over the past few months, we have had a few cakes for celebrating birthdays, etc. and four departmental luncheons. Luncheons, mind you, where everyone is asked to make something at home and bring it to work to eat. In the past few weeks, I’ve made carrot salad, a roast beef, potato salad and pumpkin cupcakes!

All this on top of the fact that someone is ALWAYS bringing in some homemade concoction every other day to share with everyone else (I’m guilty, too).

Today, we are having yet another luncheon – a hot dog luncheon, complete with all the fixin’s: baked beans, coleslaw, potato salad (I made that, of course) and everything else. Just last night, when I got home from work and started rummaging through the pantry for ingredients to make my potato salad, hubby said, “Is that all you people do at the office is eat?” He had a point.

It’s now 9:30 in the morning and the smell of hot dogs cooking in the crock-pot that someone dragged to work is making me nauseous.

This whole thing is getting kind of out of hand. We eat to celebrate birthdays, we eat to celebrate a holiday, we eat to celebrate when someone leaves the company. This week alone, we had a retirement party, and today we’re having a going-away party. (Trust me, if you knew who is going away, you’d celebrate too!)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to shove a bowl of potato salad somewhere into an already over-loaded refrigerator.