The misdial-AKA wrong number

Today's lesson (if you will) builds upon yesterday. If you'll remember, we talked about the difference between a missed call and an actual message. Today, we'll talk about misdialing. Though we are just going to concentrate on when someone from a company misdials and ends up ringing your phone. Not when you misdial and hang up on me or demand I repeat 3-5 times the name of the company I work for, what we do, and why we'd be calling you while you hear all my lines ringing in the background. We'll talk about listening skills in another post.

Now, a misdial has another name you may be more familier with. This name is "Wrong number". It happens when numbers are transposed somewhere along the line. Or gosh darn it, you hit the 5 when you were trying for the 4! These things happen, we're human after all.

How would this relate to a missed call vs. a message? Well, here's a little story for you. John needs to make a phone call. When John is dialing the number, he misdials and ends up calling the wrong number. He doesn't leave a message because he realizes his mistake because he was trying to reach Nancy, but he got David's voicemail. That was a clue to him that he somehow had the wrong number. This misdail will in turn make David's phone tell him he has a missed call. And since we now know a missed call is just a missed call and not a message, David does not need to call the number on the Caller ID back. Make sense? Good.

"What's the problem? Why would it be an issue to you if John has fat finger syndrome?" you may be wondering now. It's not really a problem for me if John has fat finger syndrome. However, when David looks at his phone, sees the misdial, and decides to call back, we have a problem. Because I don't know that it was John that had a case of fatty fingers and accidentally called David when he was trying to call Nancy. This leads us to an impasse. David's on the phone, and he knows someone called, but he doesn't know who. I'm on the phone with David, who has informed me that someone called, but I also don't know who. Do you see now why this is a problem?

The intention of this post was to reaffirm why it is unnecessary, a waste of time, and really a bit silly, to call back a number you don't know just because you saw you had a missed call. I hope it's helped you to be a better phone user.

What's the difference between a message and caller ID? Oh, let me explain!

There's a huge difference.

I have found many, many, many callers do not understand that the number your phone gives you when you've missed a call is, in fact, not a message. It's just your phone saying "Hey! You missed a call from this number. I don't know who it is, because you haven't programed my SIM card with it yet. So maybe you don't know who it is either." That's all it's telling you. I swear. I know, crazy thought, but the truth nonetheless.

So onto what a message really is. It's when your phone says "Hey! You have a voice mail." You should probably listen to it, because the person that left it probably was telling you why they were calling, and more importantly, THEIR NAME. It would be really silly (bad silly at that) to call back before listening to the message, because you won't know who called you.

If there was no voice mail, you did not receive a message. You had a missed call. The reason it's important to comprehend this difference is this: Receptionists as a species are not yet able to pull information from the ether of the universe. It's an unfortunate fact. So, if you didn't get a message, or equally as bad, you got a message and didn't listen to it, we can not help you. And we won't want to either. Because you called a number, and you don't know why. That made us mad. So there.