Dear Miss Manners: An issue I am repeatedly experiencing in both my professional and personal life is that when someone calls and I send them to voicemail (because I cannot take their call at the time), often the person hangs up and calls right back. Sometimes they do this several times in a row.<\/p>\n
It is extremely frustrating. If I declined your call, it means I am not available to talk at the time. Hanging up and calling back won\u2019t make me available; all it will do is interrupt what I am doing and make me frustrated.<\/p>\n
In my profession, I do remote health assessments with patients. It is quite common for another patient to call when I am on the phone with someone else. I will send that call to voicemail, and then the person will hang up and call back. I have had people call back six or seven times in a row, interrupting the care I am attempting to give another patient.<\/p>\n
It seems to be that many people today think that repeatedly calling is going to give them a better chance of reaching the person. This is a false assumption.<\/p>\n
I beg you to get the word out to your readers: If someone cannot take your call, they can\u2019t take your call. If you are sent to voicemail, leave a message and give it a rest. Maybe try back later. But please don\u2019t be that rude person calling over and over to someone who is not available at the time.<\/p>\n
Gentle Reader: Noted. Miss Manners is certain that you already thought of using technology to solve the problem \u2014 putting your phone on \u201cDo Not Disturb\u201d and so on.<\/p>\n
But you also might remind your patients that if they think everything is an emergency, then nothing will be. It will not be as effective as just ignoring them, but at least it will have been said out loud.<\/p>\n
Please send your questions to Miss Manners at missmanners.com<\/a>, by email to dearmissmanners@gmail.com<\/a>, or through postal mail to Miss Manners, Andrews McMeel Syndication, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dear Miss Manners: An issue I am repeatedly experiencing in both my professional and personal life is that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":418315,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[134,527,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-418314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418314\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/418315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}