Keep a twinkle in your eye

One of the consequences of T.Aldous' 'phone having been listed as the number for telephone renewals in the Phone Book of 1997 is that he has an excuse to have his 'phone permanently put through to his Secretary. Which means that everyone else has to take his calls because Tilly Floss, his Secretary, is never at her desk. Two of today's examples will illustrate this..


The Acquisitions team, still at half-strength, still desperately trying to catch up with the backlog of work created by their prodigious bit of end-of-year sensation, constantly being boggled by the ever-more nebulous answers to questions about their goals and work plans, also cop for most of the telephone receptionist work. During a particularly fraught hour, Noreen happened to pass the caretaker's room and there was Tilly, making notes in the community room booking diary.

"Couldn't you do that at your own desk?"

"No, it gets too busy to work there."

"How do you know?"

A bit later, Tilly's phone rings again. "Could somebody answer that for me please?" she shouts from the one and only desk on the whole floor that doesn't have a telephone. Altough there are eight other desks she could use for whatever it is she's doing, this particular desk is the one that does it best.


Earlier this year I had to complete a scoping document to see if any of our customer-facing staff should be moved to the new corporate call centre. It seems I successfully argued against any of our front-line staff's getting co-opted. I conveniently forgot Tilly's post in this review; I begin to wonder if that was a mistake.