September 19, 2003
Hold-a-thon
I am starting to think that I should stop making posts. This post and my last one are beginning to show that I cannot be trusted with sharp objects, puppies and small children. :)
Yesterday I was attending a meeting via teleconference from my desk. Most of the other attendees were all meeting in person and there were only three of us that had to join remotely. My boss (Pat) who was away in Europe at the time called me while I was on this call, and seeing her number come up on my caller ID, I knew that I needed to take it.
I should have just hung up from the conference call. I should have just hung up. Did I? Nope. I put them on hold. It sounds simple enough, except for the fact that when I put people on hold, my phone begins playing elevator music.
Elevator music. Ugh.
Now the entire meeting was listening to this horrible music. I ended up being on the phone with Pat for almost 20 minutes having left them on hold and because I was on the other line they couldn't get through to me in order to ask me to hang up. I received a few voicemail messages from people asking me to hang up during that time. *so embarrassed*
When I did finally return to the call (which by the way lasted almost 3 hours) I apologized to them profusely expecting people to be pretty upset with me for having done that. I was quickly reminded that I work almost exclusively with chemists, microbiologists and technology people. Essentially all geeks like me (potentially even geekier), who told me that the biggest problem with the music was that some people in the room decided to sing along. Freaks.
I love working with scientists. On Monday mornings no one talks about the big game or NOMAH. If there are 9 people on a committee they are less likely to make a joke about how we have enough people to play baseball and more likely to state that we need to liberate one individual so that we can create a more stable valence shell of electrons. :)