I don't have call waiting on my cell phone or on my home phone. I have it on my business line, but not because I wanted it. My business line is cable phone through Time Warner, which I got because it has the all-important voice mail, which is much clearer than any answering machine I ever put on there, but it also comes automatically with call waiting, which is really irritating because it breaks into the line and is constantly barraging you, and then you know when it's kicking into voice mail because suddenly all sound ceases, including the words of the person talking to you, for about 2 seconds. Irritating as anything.

I bring this up because something I hate is when I'm talking to someone and they suddenly have to see who's on the other line. It's as if they're saying "you're not important enough to me because someone else might be more interesting to talk to that's now calling me." If they have kids, I can understand it a bit more, but not much. No matter who it is, though, I have a 10 second rule; I wait any longer than that for you to get back to me, you're going to have air when you come back.

I might have thought I was alone in this thought until I saw Tom McMahon's blog, where he quoted a piece from Burt Prelutsky's article titled Time On My Hands.

It's a very good article of his thoughts on why people keep you waiting and not apologizing for it. I fully understand, as I've written about different things concerning both courtesy and customer service that have irritated me. My house is like a blanket of invisibility at times. It's happening again lately, where people make appointments to stop by the house for some kind of business we're hoping to do with them, then they never show up. This time around, at least both of them finally called to apologize, but usually it seems like we never hear from them again.

In this circumstance, the first one forgot because his daughter and grandchildren stopped by for a visit unannounced. I can understand excitement over seeing the family, and a quick phone call would have been all I needed to move on with my day. Instead, my wife and I waited 90 minutes before deciding to leave; after all, we didn't want to be rude hosts by leaving if all that had happened was that he'd gotten caught in traffic. But he did call; 7 hours later, while we weren't home, but at least he called.

The other guy? We need a little construction work done, and this guy is the contractor of one of my wife's best friends. Supposedly he does great work, but can go missing from time to time. My wife still invited him over to evaluate our needs. He said he was coming on this particular day, and he did; he just never said when, so we waited in the house all day and, just as we'd decided to leave because we had to get some things for me, since I was leaving town, that's when he finally showed up. He did his thing and left, and now we haven't heard from him in two weeks, just to give us an estimate as to how much it would all cost, let alone schedule the work. I've asked my wife to call someone else; summer's almost over, and we'd like to get this thing done some time before 2010.

My goodness, how many years ago at this juncture did I write an article called Common Courtesy, which I eventually shared with my consulting group, the Professional Consultant's Association of Central New York? Sometimes, it seems some things only change if they're getting worse.