My employer is pissing me off.

[RRD3]

I carry a cell phone just like everyone else, and I use it as my only phone. I work for an IT company and I'm required to be on-call after hours once a month. No direct contact with any of our customers as they have to call our NOC (Network Operations Center) If the NOC can not resolve the problem they call the on-call Engineer.

Here's the problem... not mine, my companies.

My voice mail for "my" phone is this.

"Hi, I'm not available at this time to answer my phone. Please leave your name, number and time you called and I will get back to you as soon as I can. If you would like to hear this message again in English, press 1. If you would like to learn English press 2. Thanks and have a great day."

Some how my voice mail message got back to the higher ups in my company who sent me an email asking me to change my voice mail as it's not appropriate.

This is my personal phone and NO customer will ever have my number and will never have the chance to listen to that voice mail.


What do you guys think? Should I change it? Should I tell my company to provide me a phone and I'll put what ever voice mail they want on it?
I think it's complete bull shit, but then again I do not want to lose my job in this market.

[Colorado Osprey]

As a right to work state they can ask you to change something.
Do you have to... no

If the phone is not paid for in any way by the company... they can not make you change it.

You can loose your job...just like you can change your outgoing message.


If you want to twist, yet still comply...Go to the other extreme...
Make the outgoing message in french, russian, german, greek, hebrew...whatever.
Best yet if you have any anchestors that used a different language.
That way if they ask you to change it again you can claim ethnic racism.

Sorry, I like to push manager's buttons sometimes and see if their blood pressure rises and they turn red.... then I wait for their head to explode... but it never does.

Feel free to not take my advice.

[RRD3]

Osprey... you just gave me an idea. My family is Scottish


I still have a number of relatives that live in Scotland. Their accent is so strong you can understand a damn thing they say unless you have been around it a lot. Now that could make a good voice mail message.

[GunTroll]

I changed my generic message to spanish for a time and pissed everyone off. I wouldn't change it. I would ask for a work phone!

[sniper7]

Depends on what you think. times are tough, finding a job etc. there are a lot of people out there who would enjoy having a job.

I personally think you should leave it, or make it worse because I don't think a company should tell me what to do, but on the other hand I like having a job and for something so small i wouldn't worry about it.

but your argument is pretty good. do others get a company phone? If so, bring it up and tell them your personal phone is just that and if they want you to have a work phone they can pay for it.

Of course you could just go all out and say what you really want to say on your voicemail. If you lose your job, don't worry, I will keep you afloat buying your ammo off you!

[vim]

Personal phone being used for work?

If they have an expectation that you are available via a cell phone, they should be paying for a cell phone. And the message on that phone should be professional and adhere to whatever standards they want.

[Medic583]

I had a similar experience with my employer where I had a post on my myspace page. Our HR director had found it and decided it was inappropriate, given that I was a field supervisor at the time. Now mind you, personal opinion / content in no way directed at my employer or the agencies we work with, and it wasn't anything to even do with EMS. Yeah, I got made an example for the rest of the company to see and was demoted, given a final written warning and told to train my replacement supervisor or else get fired. I took the punishment. . . funny thing was that my replacement. . . yeah, she quit 2 wks later and went to another ambulance service.

[Elhuero]

Ignore the email. If its really a problem for them, they'll come talk to you in person.

If they do, tell them (in a polite, appropriate way) that it's your phone, you pay the bill, and you'll set the voicemail greeting to anything you choose.

If they want you to be on call for work, and they want your voicemail greeting to conform to a script, then they should provide you with a phone.

Or just change your greeting to the "number you have dialed has been disconnected" recording.

Either way, if you get canned some bricks thru their windows should even things out.

[ChunkyMonkey]

I changed my generic message to spanish for a time and pissed everyone off. I wouldn't change it. I would ask for a work phone!

+1.. they want to dictate your voicemail.. they should pay for it! Good luck to you. On the flip side, it sucks that the guys who have strong principal usually don't get ahead because we refuse to kiss asses!

Keep a log of these stuffs too - just in case things got out of hand. I know someone who was constantly harrassed for his personal blog and 'laid off' by a fortune 500 locally in Denver. Now he is living of 8k/month settlement for the next decade or so. His daily log which sometimes posted on his blog won his settlement.

[RRD3]

+1.. they want to dictate your voicemail.. they should pay for it! Good luck to you. On the flip side, it sucks that the guys who have strong principal usually don't get ahead because we refuse to kiss asses!

Keep a log of these stuffs too - just in case things got out of hand. I know someone who was constantly harrassed for his personal blog and 'laid off' by a fortune 500 locally in Denver. Now he is living of 8k/month settlement for the next decade or so. His daily log which sometimes posted on his blog won his settlement.

Sounds like a good idea. The thing that gets me is this is my personal phone. They pay nothing towards the bill, even when I'm on-call.
I think I'll sit it out like Elhuero said and make them come talk to me.
Then when they do I'll speak in German. See how that works.


It's AMERICA Phuckers.... SPEAK ENGLISH or get the fuck out of my country! I fought for it. Ohh... and BTW. The Declaration and the Bill of Rights are in ENGLISH!

/rant off



And to Sniper7, your right the amount of .223 that I have could make up my yearly salary if I lost my job at this rate per 1k
And hey... thanks for the PMAGS! They're freaking bad ass.