Miss Manners

I love Miss Manners. She's an excellent writer and unexpectedly funny. She's one of the very few advice columnists that I almost always agree with. I have a couple of her books and every once in a while I'll go to the Washinton Post online and read a bunch of her columns.

It can be a pain sometimes cause you have to click back and forth to keep reading, but actually, the only thing that really bothers me is when one of her readers will write her a letter and try to imitate her writing style and act overly formal and pretentious.

Anyway, I have a complaint: I answer a lot of business calls and people are always trying to get connected to the owners. They ask for them by their first names- which I don't like but I've learned to live with; everyone's on a first-name-basis with everyone and that's just the way it is- but what I really can't stand is that they don't indentify themselves.

Grown men and women make phone calls like 13-year-olds- "Hi, is Jimmy there?"

The owners get about 20 phone calls a day and none of them are from people they wanna talk to. It's people selling things or people wanting a donation. I can always tell which callers are legit; they'll say, "Hi, this is Peter Davis from Coca-Cola..."

We have a problem when other employees call, or the owner's kids. I'll say that the owners aren't around and ask if they wanna leave a message and then once they identify themselves I say, "Oh, yeah, they're upstairs, hold on a moment, I'll call them".

As for the all the other people, they never wanna leave a message, they just ask when a good time to call would be and I always say they'll be in the office between 5pm and 7pm. By that time the place is closed and the only person around is the cleaning guy.