New Toy

I’ve been spending a lot of time on conference calls lately, at work. Too much time; there have been a number of days that I’ve gone home with a sore ear, from holding a phone against it the whole afternoon.

So I’ve got a new toy: a phone headset. (It’s not exactly like the one shown here, but pretty much the same.) And it works great, but there are some things I need to get used to:

• I can’t drink coffee while I’m using the headset. I keep trying to raise the cup to my lips, only to have it knock against the microphone.
• When someone calls me, it takes me a few seconds to arrange everything, before I can answer the call. I have to grab the headset and get it arranged on my head—I don’t yet have enough skill with it to be able to just throw it on—clip the wire to my shirt, so as not to get myself tangled up, and then press the appropriate button on my phone to answer the call. As opposed to simply picking up the receiver, and talking.
• Hopefully the technology compensates for this, but when I’m wearing it, I keep hearing myself breathe. Apparently my nose is close enough to the microphone that it picks it up. As I say, I hope the technology somehow compensates for that, because I don’t want everyone on my conference calls to hear my breathing the whole time!