HELLO? SPACE CADET CALLING

Lesson one. Learn how to engage brain before opening mouth. This holds especially true when one is in the workplace, calling a vendor to rectify a situation which has many people involved, including the VP of the company.

If one does not learn to engage brain before opening mouth, the following may occur, and did to this SPACE CADET today!

To Begin: You call the vendor. You reach his voice mail. You begin your spiel and mentally pat yourself on the back as you are being very professional AND using words that actually sound pretty damn good. Words longer than four letters in length! :)

Now, in learning how to be a total ass in one simple moment, do as I did today.

You get the message out, and begin to leave your phone number. I began with, "please give me a call at" and say the prefix, but it is the wrong prefix, so I say, "wait, that isn't right, call me at..." and once again, I give a prefix, which in this case is correct, but then I continue with" xxx". Then say, "Wait! That is the beginning of my home number". Thus, I begin again, "ok, the number is....". and give the correct prefix but the FAX number". By this time I'm so totally pissed at myself that I forget I'm at work and say "OH SCREW IT!" before FINALLY getting out my work number!!!

As soon as I had hung up the phone I was in MAJOR shock. Did I just tell a vendor to "SCREW IT"? My brain asked? OH MY GOD!!

Now! How do I try and rectify the situation!! I pull up my contact person's name in the computer for said company ( a different person). I see the company is in Florida. ( Hmmm, I'm thinking, I may be ok, Florida is a laid back State like CA, right? PLEASE GOD!) So I connect with the man and I tell him my reason for calling (the reason I left a vm for his co worker) and then I told him what I did.

He began laughing and laughing. I asked if the other person had a sense of humor, "OH YEA" he replied. I said lamely, "well, I'm from California, just chalk it up to that". I then heard a great deal about what people think of Californians. (As always, "space cadets", which I could not disagree with after what I pulled).

I felt I'd dodged a bullet. I went for coffee and came back to my desk to see a message light on my phone. It was the guy whose vm I'd gotten. He was cracking up! Said they would keep my
message in the "hall of voice mail fame". "WHEW"! (and it's only WEDNESDAY)!! (sniff)