---
title: "My phone manners need work"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/8/my-phone-manners-need-work.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/8/my-phone-manners-need-work.html"
published: "2004-04-08T19:35:00"
updated: "2004-04-08T19:35:00"
tags: ["Off Topic"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "Tal says I'm impossible to talk to on the phone when I'm at work. She's right, of course. I'm always sounding either condesending, impatient or bored. I really need to work on it. Sorry honey. (of course, instead of…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# My phone manners need work

By Roy Osherove April 8, 2004 In [Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic)

**Historical article** · Originally published April 8, 2004; technical details may be outdated.

Tal says I'm impossible to talk to on the phone when I'm at work. She's right, of course. I'm always sounding either condesending, impatient or bored. I really need to work on it. Sorry honey.

(of course, instead of leaving my computer, her I am **blogging** about it. go figure)

## More in Off Topic

[All posts in Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic)

- Apr 13, 2004

    ### [My Passover Present](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/13/my-passover-present.html)

- Apr 11, 2004

    ### [Non MVPs at the MVP summit - looks bad, smells bad](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/11/non-mvps-at-the-mvp-summit-looks-bad-smells-bad.html)

- Apr 5, 2004

    ### [Windows Media Player problem? here's a very good FAQ page](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/5/windows-media-player-problem-heres-a-very-good-faq-page.html)

- Apr 2, 2004

    ### [MVP Summit pointers, and a shout out to James Robertson](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/2/mvp-summit-pointers-and-a-shout-out-to-james-robertson.html)


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

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- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/