Читать книгу Blaikie’s Guide to Modern Manners - Thomas Blaikie - Страница 35

Recently, Matt suffered an embarrassment. ‘I was getting a fair number of calls in a meeting. First of all, the boss asked me to switch my phone off and everybody cheered. Then afterwards he said he wanted a quiet word: “I don’t know why you even have it out on the table. We all know you’ve got one.” He said I looked like a wanker.’

Maybe this was not quite the way to put it. But the boss was right.

The mobile phones of really senior professionals (not quite Matt, yet at least) are never seen or heard. Tim Hely Hutchinson, who is in charge of a gigantic publishing conglomerate, possesses a mobile phone but as his secretary will tell you, ‘it won’t be switched on.’

Which is just as it should be. People like that can’t be at everybody’s beck and call.

Lesser employees in open-plan offices drive their colleagues round the bend if they take personal calls on their mobiles every ten minutes, especially if, like Zoe, you have the cicada ring tone.

So, it’s perfectly simply really:

 Only allow mobile calls to interrupt other business (i.e. meetings, discussions, however informal) if you want to appear desperate and disorganised as well as rude.

 Remember the old-fashioned virtue: one thing at a time.

 If you know that you will have to take an urgent call in a meeting (even a meeting with only one other person), issue a prior warning and ask to be excused. If that isn’t possible, say, ‘Excuse me, would you mind if I take this call.’ Then disappear.

 Keep apologising.

 If your mobile is for personal use, it should be switched to silent mode in an open-plan office.