Would you like fries with that?

Dear Glob,

First day jitters suck. Once again my temp agency has me on assignment, this time at "Bright All" Electric fulfilling all their phone answering desires, hopes and dreams. I know that I am perfectly capable of answering and directing phone calls, but every time the phone rings I get this tightness at the back of my throat and all the common sense in the world goes down the drain.

My first obstacle is what to say when I answer the phone. The president has asked the staff to answer every call with a holiday greeting. I, being the spaz that I am, cannot decide on a just one, Season’s Greetings, Bright All Electric(!) or Bright All Electric, Happy Holidays(!). I spent the entire morning trying out each variation: Greeting then Bright All Electric, Bright All Electric then Greeting, how about starting off with a “Hello,” or adding “How may I help you?” or “One moment please” at the end… With all this mumbo jumbo floating around in my head, when I’m not concentrating I pick up the phone with a flustered combination: “Seasons, er, Bright All Electric… Happy Holidays! How may I… Eh, excuse me?”

If I make it past the greeting stage, then it’s on to a pretty straightforward switchboard, with 4 Orbits (or hold buttons, but Orbit is much cooler – “Excuse me, Mr. President? Story Musgrave is holding on Orbit 1.”) and a voicemail button. I say “straightforward,” but combined with the 80% chance that I’ll screw up the greeting, by the time I get to the pushing buttons part I’m already disoriented by my earlier flub. Sheesh.

Here’s my self-calculated efficiency rating for today:

Flubbed Greetings: aforementioned 80%
Dropped calls: 25%
Wrong extensions: 30% (usually mixing up the 2 Howards, one of whom is our President, eek)
Missed calls: 40%

Not too bad for my first stint as a receptionist. Seeing as I excel in the workplace, in no time I’ll be running at top shape and be named New Employee of the Month. Cocky, aren’t I?

To finish things off, I leave you with an excerpt from a Gchat conversation with my buddy, Emcee, about my first day of work:

Emcee: You should answer the phone with an accent
Emcee: like British
Me: I would if no one was around to hear me answering the telly
Me: ‘ello, ‘appy ‘olidays from bright ull electric!
Emcee: heheeehe
Emcee: or French
Emcee: ello happy holidaze from zee bright all EE lektrique
Me: hahahah Oui!

Man, work without Gchat would be like overtime without DVR. Wordmasters, hooo!