I can’t imagine how a young employee learning the ropes can acquire what she needs to know, as speedily, without the advantage of eavesdropping on her boss’s phone conversations.
How can anyone get a grasp of an industry’s pertinent relationships or decision-making time frames, let alone the fragility of a particular office’s egos, if there are so few chances to hear these people talking to the outside world? The office phone call, properly overheard, is really the cheapest, easiest way to transmit institutional knowledge.
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That brings up another reason the office phone call is worth preserving: there’s no ready substitute for practicing the necessary summoning of courage for potentially fraught encounters. Advancing in business is often a matter of gaining capacity for confrontation; to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever had to steel herself before sitting down to type a tough e-mail message.
The Office Phone Call Was Music to the Ears.