Have you ever answered the phone and realized after it was too late that it wasn’t a real person but a robo caller?

What would you do if you worked at the front desk at a company that got a lot of annoying robo calls? Would you answer the calls anyway or come up with a way to avoid the calls?

In this story, one front desk worker at a spa knows how to tell if a call is a robo call or not, but the spa owner disagrees with this method until she experiences a robo call for herself.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Trust your front desk staff

I work front desk at a busy spa and had worked here for 5 years at this point.

The last few months or so we were getting these random robocalls where we would pick up the phone and get an insanely loud beep in our ear and nothing else. This beep was so loud it made our ears ring.

We couldnt block the number since the number always changed but we at least had caller display and these specific robocalls always had a long number that started with an R.

We would get about 10 a day for a few days in a row then nothing for a month or so.

The owner didn’t like their workaround.

When the phone would ring we would wait a second for caller display to come up and if we saw the robo number we would pick up then immediately hang up.

One of the owners saw us do this – I 100% realise how it looks but we explained to her what was going on and why we were doing it, phrasing it as freeing up the phone lines for actual clients.

She replied that she understood but that we should never just hang up the phone without checking IN CASE it ever was a client, regardless of the caller display.

I was decently annoyed by this. This is the 3rd spa I’ve worked in and I thought she trusted us more than to risk just insta-hanging up on a client but whatever. She signs my paychecks.

She had the perfect opportunity to show her boss how annoying those robo calls really were.

Fast forward just a couple of hours – I was by myself on the desk and on another call when the other line started ringing.

The owner was also at the desk and looked at me to see if I wanted her to answer it.

I looked at the caller display, saw it was the robo caller and told her “yes please!”

Could I have told her it was the robocaller? Absolutely, however I had specifically been told we ALWAYS answer the phone just in case, so telling her it was the robocaller should not have mattered. Just doing my job and earning that signature on my paycheck.

Yup, it was a robo caller.

The owner picks up the phone and says “Thank you for cal-” before yanking the phone away from her ear and cringing as we all heard the loudest most obnoxious beep coming from the receiver.

She slams the phone down and looks at it like it slapped her and called her “mommy.”

She turns and looks at me, says “jeez, that was loud” while I just slowly nodded in response. She walked away shaking her head and rubbing her ear.

The owner finally understands.

A little later in the evening I was doing the closing paperwork and she was standing at the desk waiting for a client. The phone rang, checked the caller display, robocaller.

She looked at me, I looked at her, I picked it up and immediately hung up.

She just nodded slowly and went back to her phone.

Occasionally to this day she and the other owner forget to check the caller ID and get a rude reminder of why we check the caller ID.

Sometimes, explaining something to someone isn’t the same as letting them experience it for themselves. I’m glad the owner had that experience and understood their workaround.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

The key word here is “should.”

Do people still use fax machines?

This is a good tip and a good question.

Here’s some more good advice.

Another person shares a story about working at the front desk.

If only there were a way to get the calls to stop.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.