2nd June 2011
On telephone etiquette and manners
Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.
Today we live in a world of technology and material comforts. Our life is made easy with a lot of electronic gadgets and equipments. Especially in the field of communication and information technology, we are flooded with so much of equipments and gadgets which we might not have dreamt of some twenty years ago.
One such gadget is the mobile phone or cell phone. I am writing this piece from a very leading and world class eye hospital. I was in the reception area where the manager was seriously giving advice to post operative patients and patients who are going to get operated that day. His mobile was ringing and he continued to advice the patients ignoring the phone call. After sometime, the caller disconnected the phone. A few seconds later again the phone rang, perhaps from the same person. Our friend again ignored, and the phone stopped ringing after a while. Again the phone rang!
I am not able understand this peculiar behaviour of our friend as well as the caller. I thought he could have either answered the call or requested the other person to call later; or, he could put the phone in the `vibration' mode so that the phone need not disturb others; or the caller could have understood that our friend was not in a position to pick up the call and could have called later.
I noticed that the people in the reception area were quite irritated by the behaviour of our friend. Not only that. I noticed that there were about twenty five to thirty people in the reception area and their phones were also constantly ringing one after the other. Some had jarring caller ring tones; some had cine songs; some had cats mewing or birds chirping as their favourite ring tones! On the whole, the environment was not conducive for a hospital where post operative and pre operative patients wait with lot of anxiety and tension.
Next time if you are in a public place, notice the way people behave with their mobile phones and think for a while if all of us could behave in a more responsible way. We should use technology to our advantage, but our using the technology should not be a nuisance to others?
Can we follow some etiquette and manners in using cell phones?
N C Sridharan
000
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