Why Phone Etiquette Is Oh So Important In This Day And Age

Just now someone called my home. The conversation went like this:

Me: Hello?

Teen: Yo.

Me: Um ... hi. Who wer...

Teen: *click*

Nice.

A simple "Sorry, I have the wrong number" would have been supremely easy to spit out and would have been gladly accepted. I'm blogging this little exchange as a warning to all the politeness-challenged morons out there who have yet to realize that manners are important.

Just imagine that you, Teen, hung up on someone that was a REAL a-hole. A busy-body. A psycho. A gamer that has been camping outside of a Best Buy in vain, coming home empty Wii-handed. A woman who is raging with PMS and just ran out of chocolate. I could go on ... basically, Teen, these are the people in your neighbourhood. People that you should not be messing with with your lack of phone etiquette.

Why, asks the ignorant Teen? Because, stupid Teen, these people more than likely have the most basic access to everyday technology. Call display, for instance, and a computer that hooks up to the Internet. Pretty standard, yes?

Within 2 minutes of the click in my ear, I - and anybody that knows how to read and type - was able to find out the following:

* The name of Teen's mother

* The home phone number

* Teen's home address

* A map leading me to that address

* Teen's mother's volunteer organization, of which she is on the board

* Meeting times of Teen mother's organization

* A map to those meeting locations

And I'm not even that driven to find you, Teen. You are so lucky that I still had some Toblerone in the house.