Tuesday, February 17, 2009

19th Century Message Taking

My company is running some crazy marketing promotion to try and boost our sales. It actually seems to be working since the phones won’t stop ringing with questions. And seeing as how there are only 2 people handling these calls, clients can’t always get through and are forced to leave messages. But I found something interesting out about my company regarding messages, in that the people at the front desk still use these:


I was a bit shocked when I saw someone get handed one of these antiquated slips of pink paper. Back in the day when my mom worked in a church office I thought these were the most amazing things since sliced bread. It had all the convenient little boxes to check and places to put all the important information. Granted the church secretary usually just scribbled everything in the bottom but I was still impressed. I stole a pad of them every chance I got and would use them to write notes for my stuffed animals at home. (And don’t you even start to judge me about stealing from a church. If I think about it I’ll tell you the story about the food pantry and SPAM. That is so much worse.)
Aside from the fact that we now have the amazing invention know as Voice Mail my company is trying to be green and always telling us to use less paper. I guess this idea doesn’t include messages which could just as easily be passed along with an e-mail.

Plus then, we wouldn’t have to deal with crappy handwriting…

~The Office Scribe

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Maybe someone just really likes checking those boxes.

Bee (the one who muses) said...

We have those in my office too and like you said, we have voicemail. I've been working here 3 years (4 in October) and the rest of the ""ladies"" have been here a decade or more. Can you believe I had to teach them how to transfer calls from their voicemails? Or when I'm on the phone I have to walk them through the process of sending it directly to my voicemail. They still don't get it and will write up a message and then miss something important like the person's name.

"Hi. I'm Bee calling from so and so and was wondering if you have a woman with a smoker's voice who called asking for me?"