The Reliable Unreliability of Scheduled Phone Calls

You need to talk to a client, colleague or other business associate, but meeting in person is impractical for whatever reason. And, because of the delicious irony of society’s unwillingness to be so rude as to simply call someone despite 97.684% of humans unable to go more than three seconds without staring at their phones, something has to be scheduled.

“Hey, do you have any time this afternoon or tomorrow morning for a quick call?” someone might say to you via email.

The proper response is either no, followed by specific times you are available, or yes, followed by specific times within that window. Instead, you respond with, “Yes, that sounds great. I’m flexible. What time works best for you?”

Six or seven email exchanges later, during which you waver on times and give each other unnecessary details of surrounding commitments leading to one of you realizing you’re in different time zones, requiring a clarification of what time actually means, followed by another three emails deciding whether you will call him or he will call you, you establish your client will call you at 3:00 p.m. ET tomorrow. This process takes more time out of both parties’ days than merely making an unannounced phone call would’ve, but let’s not worry about that.

The Actual Call

Having scheduled calls before, you know exactly what’s going to happen. It is now tomorrow at 2:33 p.m. ET, and you’re making sure you’re properly prepared for whatever the discussion topic is going to be, and your productivity slows on all your other responsibilities because your phone could ring at any time. But you know it won’t.

Although you are doing everything right by being prepared on the off chance the call actually happens, you know it won’t matter because you are going to receive a text message from your client at 2:57 p.m. ET.

You do. It reads, “hey something came up can we push call to 330 thx.”

Because you’re well into your career and have already had your sense of self-worth crushed repeatedly, you don’t waste time realizing how insulting it is to have someone wait until three minutes before the scheduled time to tell you something more important than you but not so important to require more than a half hour came up, and you respond in the affirmative.

Plus, you can finally relax, because you know what the text you get at 3:32 p.m. ET is going to say: “sry got caught up here can we try again in 2 weeks?”

And with that, you know you will never talk to that person again. On the plus side, you wasted an entire hour because you’re a quality professional trying to be prepared for all scenarios such as actually having the call as scheduled, putting you at 3:32 p.m. ET with no motivation left. You might as well quit early today.

Enjoy. You earned it.