Celphones

[Dips]

Can I tell my customers to either use a proper damned phone when they call me, or use email?

I think you should be able to. I do that myself since I'm not much help to anyone if I can't make out they're saying. And, since our customers pay for the phone call to tech support, I assume most would prefer not running up their phone bill to keep repeating themselves.

I'm not rude about it. I just say, "I'm really sorry but I can't hear you over this connection. Do you want to try again from another phone?"

Never had anyone bitch at me about that. Sometimes they ask to try moving to another room and that's fine. We try it and sometimes that fixes it. Sometimes it doesn't.

If they still persist after we've tried a few things and I still can't make out what they're saying, I just state, "I'm sorry. I'm afraid we've lost this connection; I can't hear you. If you can still hear me at all please call back and ask for Dips." Then I hang up.

[Flying Grype]

I can't believe the poor quality of celphone calls from the other side of the continent. At least, I think they're cels. They belong to students. They might also be campus landlines. I suspect cels because I'm calling them in the middle of the school day.

Can I tell my customers to either use a proper damned phone when they call me, or use email? My head is starting to hurt from trying to interpret calls that sound like they're from Charlie Brown's teachers.

At least I can pick out a few words -- one kid left a voicemail and read out his phone number in it, and I was able to pick out enough of it to search the string in our order records and find his email address.