D.F.

Krause

Read D.F.'s bio and previous columns

June 30, 2008

I’m Calling You On Vacation, And I Don’t Care

I’ve decided that, starting right now, I’m interrupting your vacation. And it’s your own fault.

This is the result of my calling you and getting a most unwanted bit of information: “You’ve reached Bob Matheson. I am out of the office until Monday, July 14. Please leave a message at the tone and I will get back to you upon my return. If this is an urgent matter, you can reach me on my cell phone at 616.BLAHBLA.”

Now, the old D.F. would have said, “Oh dear, I don’t want to bother Bob on his vacation!” I might have tried to conjure up, in my mind, some justification I might have used to explain why it really was a very, very, very urgent situation, and I needed to make his cell phone ring at the very moment he was strapping water skis on little Bob Jr. for the first time.

Had I actually made the call, I would have apologized six or seven times before bringing up whatever business had necessitated the call, and six or seven times after. That was the old D.F.

What does the new D.F. say?

Screw it. Make the call.

Much of this is the product of my own evolution, but there are good practical reasons as well. In the past two years, I’ve made a transition from mainly using an office phone for business to using my cell phone almost exclusively. The only reason I even still have the desk phone is that I have a lease on the system and no one is quite sure where we would go to get rid of it. The cell phone has graduated from my when-I’m-on-the-road-or-after-hours phone to My Phone.

And once your cell phone becomes Your Phone, you get used to the idea that you’re never really out of the office. If this offends your sense of work/home separation, don’t give out your cell phone number. But chances are, you’ll realize after about three weeks that your personal sovereignty is not under attack because you got a work call while you were doing the dishes.

So I don’t fret for Bob’s personal time because I’m not too terribly concerned about my own.

As a practical matter, I’m calling Bob on vacation because I know darn well that there is no one else in his office who has the answer to my question, and I have no intention of waiting until July 14 to get it. I suppose I could. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if this item stayed on my to-do list until then.

But I want to get it done, and I’ve simply decided Bob being on vacation isn’t a good enough reason to have to wait two weeks. So I’m calling.

Bob did make a choice, you realize. Two choices, actually. First, he made a choice to give out his cell phone number on his voice mail greeting – not to mention leaving it up to me to define what an “urgent situation” is. I define urgent by how patient I’m feeling that day.

Second, he made a choice not to include the following in his voice mail greeting: “If this is D.F. Krause, my colleague Erin has the answer to your question.”

Would I still call Bob on vacation then? Of course not. I’m not a sadist. I just want my question answered. But Bob wouldn’t think to leave the information with Erin because Bob doesn’t think like that. He’s very good at his job, but he figures that when it’s time to go on vacation, all he needs to do is go.

So I made the call. It took about three minutes. Bob had exactly the information I needed. I did hear Mrs. Matheson grousing in the background, “We’re on vacation!”

I’ll leave it to Bob to explain how that ridiculous D.F. Krause just can’t let a man take his family on vacation in peace. I just hope they don’t stand there arguing about it too long. Bob Jr. is waiting to ski!

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