OK, today’s pet peeve is the piped music you get when you’re put on hold on the telephone. I’m in work, it’s 2:15 AM, and we’re working a serious system issue. There are about two dozen of us, physically located everywhere from Guatemala through USA to Belgium, and several points inbetween, and all on the same conference call. Now some idiot has put the call ‘on hold’ which means that the rest of us get piped music blaring out. And because the cheapo conference call system we have here hands the ‘talking stick’ to one person at a time, and the piped music is currently holding it, no-one else can talk whilst it’s going on. Great. So now we have to sit around unable to work the issue until chummy comes back from his toilet break, smoke, nap, or whatever.
Operating as a ‘virtual’ organization works well for the most part, but there’s still a lot to be said for having the whole team in the same office. It’s not that it is necessarily more efficient to work that way, it just means that we could have all gone round to the office of the person who put us on hold and take turns giving them a good kicking!
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