Telephone Tribulations

In our modern society it seems that 90% of the population has a cell phone strapped to their hip or tucked in a purse so they can maintain constant and continuous contact with every other human being they know. When they come across someone who fails (or in my case make that 'refuses') to get on board with this ideology, they become irritable. We encounter these irritable people occasionally and are berated for not being more "accessible". There are several reasons why I will not join in with this 'Borg-like' lifestyle, and I'd like to explain them as this month's article.

Foremost is that woodworking is seriously dangerous business. Any tool that will cut cleanly through a 2" thick slab of white oak lumber will cut through flesh and bone like it's not even there. A blade or bit whirling at thousands of RPM can throw a piece of wood with tremendous force if it binds. Anyone in the path of this missile will get hurt. Therefore a moment of inattentiveness can result in the loss of one or more fingers, or a limb, or an eye, or even your life. When a phone rings, it is human nature to want to hustle to answer it, especially in this age where people expect to get an answer in 3 rings or less. Always. Rushing a cut or abandoning a tool while it's running to answer the telephone is a sure-fire recipe for an accident. So we have, so far, avoided having a telephone in the shop simply for safety reasons.

But, another reason is that so many of the calls we do receive are trash calls. Or, to borrow a term from the Internet; Spam. Telemarketers, wanting to sell us everything from carpet cleaning services to a postal meter, and 'directories' wanting to 'verify' their information (and at the end offer to sell us a subscription to some service they provide) and lately we've been getting several calls a day that are recorded messages bashing some political candidate or other. These calls will end when the elections are over, but the telemarketers are still a serious annoyance.

Yet another is the fact that most of the calls we get that actually pertain to our products are people asking what our pricing is, what our delivery time is, what woods are available, etc. The answers to all of these questions are readily available on our web site; the same web site they got our phone number from. Now, to be fair, I do know that some people are simply much more comfortable with their telephone than they are the internet; they're new at this but have had a phone forever. Some who call don't even have internet access; a friend or relative printed off a page from our web site and wrote our phone number on it.

But at the same time these people must realize that time spent dealing with all these phone calls is time not spent building furniture. Smoky Mountain Woodworks is a small shop, with one or two people in the shop most times. If there are two of us it is usually because we are doing something that takes two people to accomplish. Taking one of them away to answer the telephone effectively shuts down the progress of our work for both people. If the call is from someone who is seriously interested in our work and needs answers not available on the web site, then this is time well spent. But if it is someone wanting advice on how to stain the porch swing he just built or someone gathering pricing from as many furniture makers as possible on 'a dining room table that is so-wide by so-long' (with no details whatsoever), then this is wasted time.

If *you* were paying us an hourly rate to build a piece of furniture, would you want us spending a couple of hours per day answering the telephone on your time card?

We are not to the point where hiring an office manager to do bookkeeping, handle e-mail and answer the telephone would make any sense. That would mean paying them a wage good enough to insure that they will actually show up for work every day and paying workman's compensation insurance, unemployment insurance, FICA taxes and benefits. These costs would have to be factored back into the prices you pay for our furniture -- a piece of furniture that takes two weeks to build would cost an additional $360.00 on average. Would *you* be willing to pay it?

However, there are enough telephone addicts calling us that we need to work out some sort of compromise.

We are currently planning to enlarge our work space. In the new workshop (assuming everything works out) will be a dedicated space for a small office. In that office will be a telephone. However, we will NOT be allowing that telephone to take over our workshop. Instead, the answering machine will go in the trash and we will simply refuse to answer the phone until it has rung at least five or six times. That ought to weed out the telemarketers and casual inquiries leaving only those who are serious about talking to us. We will not jeopardize our physical well-being in order to grab the phone, so it may ring a dozen times before getting answered if we happen to be in the middle of something that shouldn't be interrupted. But if you can be a little patient we will be happy to talk to you, once it's safe to do so.

We hope to have the new work space completed in January of 2007, but we will begin testing this telephone theory starting now by taking a cordless phone to the workshop each day and practicing NOT answering it until it has rung at least 5 times.

How's that for a compromise?