technology is dangerous

I must learn to use the new phone system at work before I am fired.

We got voice over internet phones a couple of weeks ago. They mostly work okay, but not all the time, and their functions are all different and complicated. I hit a snag with voicemail that was funny only because nobody caught it (I hope).

Our old voicemail was such that if you made a mistake while recording your outgoing message, you could just stop and record a new message and it would automatically record over the previous blooper message. The new system does not work like that. I have caught on to this mostly, but not on Monday, when I recorded my message just before leaving work for a Canada Day holiday.

I was late coming in on Wednesday, so I called my own phone to see if I could figure out how to check messages from away. I did not get so far as to do this because of what I heard:

"Thank you for calling bla bla bla ....I will be back in the office on Wednesday July...uh...uh...second? OH (PART OF A BAD WORD)!!!! click. Thank you for calling bla bla bla...etc."

The new voicemail stops when you tell it to. Then when you record again it tags on your new recording at the end of the blooper one. The result was me, leaving an outgoing message which included a mean voice blurting a partial F-bomb before cutting out, then restarting a proper and professional polite message.

There I was, away from the office, sweating that the mayor or someone was going to call me and hear my uncharacteristically coarse greeting and think "Gadzooks! Is that who's looking after the seniors' programs over there?" I quickly phoned my friend and co-worker Linda and begged her to speed over to my office and delete and rerecord a new outgoing message, which she did. When I got in to work, she reassured me that the message light was not on when she went in to fix the outgoing, so I hope that means nobody heard my crude blooper. Either that or they heard it and hung up in horror.

I will be more careful in the future.

question: did you ever say what you shouldn't have?

mompoet - be careful, very careful, what you record