Button-Down Phone: Hold That Line

Eleanor Beckman wonders if a new code of etiquette isn’t needed for those of us who have hold buttons on our phones.

Our five telephones at home are all equipped with that feature, but so far I have never used it, very probably because I don’t know the etiquette.

What do you do, Ms. Beckman asks, when you are talking on the phone and the beep lets you know that someone else is calling? Do you ignore it? Do you say, “Would you hold, please?--I have another call.” Do you answer the second call and ask that person to hold while you go back to complete the first call? Or do you let the first caller hold while you talk to the second caller?

What do you do, she wonders, if the second caller is President Bush?

Well, you wouldn’t know the second caller is President Bush unless you had asked the first caller to hold, or hung up on him, and answered the second call. Suppose you have done that, and the caller says, “This is the White House. President Bush on the line.”

Not many of us, I suppose, would say, “I have another call. Will you ask the President to hold?” Or, “Tell the President I’ll call him back.”

It would depend, of course, on who the first caller was. If it was your wife, you could say, “I’ll call you back. President Bush is on the other line.”

On the other hand, if you were talking to your boss, you might hesitate to put him on hold, or tell him you’d call him back. What I’d do, I’d tell my boss I had President Bush on the line, and ask if he wanted to hold. Put the pressure on him .

Or better yet, I could put President Bush and my boss on a conference line and we could all talk.

But President Bush might want to speak to me confidentially. What would he be calling me for anyway? He wouldn’t be calling to thank me for my vote because I didn’t vote for him. This being the violent country it is, I thought the chances were too good that an assassin could put Dan Quayle in the Oval Office. One call I never want to hear is “This is the White House. President Quayle on the line.”

As for telephone etiquette, what do you do with that new breed of pest, the recorded “message”? Recently I have twice picked up the phone to hear a recorded male voice with a pitch about high-paying jobs.

It goes something like this: “Hello. This is David Something. How would you like to have a good high-paying job? I don’t mean a job that pays only the minimum wage. I mean a good high-paying job. Is there anyone in your household who would like such a job?”

The voice then falls silent, evidently to allow an answer. Both times I answered, loud and clear: “No.”

Both times the voice resumed with great enthusiasm. “Good! Then I’ve dialed the right number! Now give me the names. . . .”

Both times I hung up. So I have never heard the pitch clear through. My guess is that there is no job at the other end. It’s probably a job-training school.

What irritates me most about that message is that it isn’t programmed to respond to my answers. With today’s sophistication in electronic equipment surely that message could be programmed to respond intelligently to my “No,” instead of pressing on, obviously not having understood my reply. Why couldn’t it just say, “Thank you anyway. Have a nice day.”

I have also had it with those companies or public agencies that put you on hold and fill your ear with insipid music when you call to report that your refrigerator isn’t working or your statement is incorrect.

Rather than playing the kind of music that is supposedly pleasant to every ear, they ought to cut you in on the Michael Jackson show, or at least the news, so that while you were waiting you could get involved. The bad side of that, though, is that just when you were getting involved your turn would come up and your call would be completed.

What we need is a book on Manners for the Electronic Age.