The Buhner.com Blog

This isn’t for people who have voicemail and don’t know how to access messages. Those people are amusing and unhelpable. No, this is for you - the person who calls me up, can’t reach me, then gets put on the spot when you reach my voicemail. Here are a few hints.

1. Leave a message. You’d think this would be a simple demand, but some people just will not leave a message and try calling again. Guess what? The likelyhood of your getting answered is about the same the second time around as it was the first time. Unless you know me that well to know that I’ll have my cell phone on me at that time and that I’ll be right by the phone and that I’m expecting your call, just leave the message. Sure, I’ve got caller ID on my phone and can see that you tried to call, but if the phone number is even slightly unfamiliar, chances are that I’m not calling because I hate the “uh, did someone call me from there?” phone conversation.
2. Tell me who the hell you are. “Hey, uh… give me a call when you get this, I need to talk to you about…” Phones doesn’t always sound perfect, and you might not sound like you do normally anyway (cold, smoker’s cough, abnormally high helium intake). Unless you’re immediate family who calls me on a regular basis, I don’t know who you are by voice. This is especially true if you think you’re funny and go for the “fake voice at first” thing before leaving your message. Trying to figure out one voice is bad enough - I don’t need to try to detect which one I should be trying to figure out.
3. Keep it under an hour. Better yet, under 30 seconds. Dude, I take medication in order to keep my attention on something. If you’re going to start talking about various things and not really talk about why you’re calling, you’ve lost me. Plus, I HATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATEHATE having to replay a message, especially one that is the voicemail equivalent of War & Peace.
4. Give me a reason to call back. This isn’t an ego “your request isn’t good enough for a response” thing. It’s a request to actually tell me why you’re calling so I know whether or not I have to look something up or pick up something or actually do something as soon as I get the message. For example, if you want to ask a question, ask it in the voicemail if it’s not too complicated or embarrassing. If you called because you wanted to ask me if there was a Toys R’ Us anywhere nearby, I could look it up and call you back with the answer. If I don’t have the time to immediately call you back, then there’s all that time wasted before I can actually call you and find out that I was supposed to find out the Toys R’ Us radius in the area. Now I have to get off the phone with you, find out the info, then call you back again. Wasted call. Calling because you need me to pick up something at the store? Say it in the message - otherwise by the time I call you back, I might already have passed the store.
5. Give me your phone number, and any “special conditions”. Basically this means if I can’t call you after 6PM because you turn off your cell phone or I should call your house if it’s after 7, then say that. I might not get back to you immediately, and if you want to bitch me out because I called you back because it wasn’t at the right time, then you’re never getting called back again. Don’t give me the “I should know” crap - I’m not your personal assistant.
6. Be honest about how “urgent” the callback is. This goes back to the days of pagers and the little teenage girls who loved to put “911″ in every page just to make sure they got called back. Once I realize you do that crap, then it’ll never work again, especially when you need it to. I don’t really have a guideline as to how quickly to call someone back if they don’t tell me what it’s for - it’s generally not a huge priority, and depends on who is calling and past calls I’ve gotten from them that triggers how quickly/slowly they’ll get a response. But don’t call me and leave a message sounding like someone died and don’t tell me anything else, because when I do call back freaked out and find out you just wanted to know what Raleigh’s airport code was (RDU), then I shoot you. If you call and say it’s no big deal or not urgent, I’ll probably be more likely to call you back than if I’m completely blind going into the call. Honesty points count.

If you can manage this, you’ll probably get the callback pretty quickly. Then again, if you had just emailed me, you’d probably get the answer even faster.