Phone Etiquette and ASSumptions

My friend and former co-worker Ashley is a gorgeous, independent Indian woman with the married name O’Shaughnessy. She called me over to her cubicle to listen to a voice mail.

A customer had called in mid-day about his wife finding some error in one of the math textbooks. I listened to it, but the guy’s mumbling was hard to decipher.

“Wait a minute, is he slurring?” I asked. All I could hear was an incoherent “My wife find some error in math book and she studies math and I just think something is wrong in math book…” (Think Danny DeVito on The View.)

“No, did he?” I asked.

“Oh yes he did” she said.

Mid-sentence the guy burped into the phone. Confirmed. He was drunk. (While, it is against proper telephone etiquette to burp into the phone, he did at least apologize.) It was hard to hold my bladder laughing so hard and the voicemail only got better.

I imagined some bloated middle-aged waste of life sitting in a lazy chair surrounded by beer cans and reading up on… pre-algebra?

At the end of his one-way conversation with himself he mumbled something about her last name O’Shaughnessy. Then, he summed up his jackassness by exclaiming “Go Irish!”