Call Waiting

We have a very advanced cell phone system here in Israel. Cell phones are so important here that they issue you one when you arrive at the airport. This is a country of talkers, and cell phones are key. In Israel there is two busy signals. The well know "beep...beep" when the phone is busy (you left the received off the hook, fool), and the unique "beep.beep...beep.beep" when the phone is busy but the callee has call waiting. The busy/call waiting signal is interesting. What it means is, yes, I have my phone, its not only working but I am currently using it.

So now the dilemma. Say you call someone and they are talking on the phone. You get the busy/call waiting tone. What do you do? Do you wait till they either answer you, telling you they are talking to someone else and go away or wait till you get their answering machine, or do you immediately hang up. The problem is that there is no standard. One more crucial piece of information is that the callee (who is currently enjoying a meaningful conversation) hears an annoying beep (or conversation dampening click on a land line) when someone calls and they are busy. Lets analyze this, the caller knows the person they are calling is busy, the callee knows someone is trying to call them. Now you either interrupt your call or ignore the caller, but you have to call back later because they know you are around.

This whole busy/call waiting signal is ridiculous. Just give the caller a normal ring tone and let the callee decide to interrupt their call or to ignore the caller and let them get to voice mail. All phones have caller ID so you know who is calling (leaving messages is so 80s anyway). The worst fall out of this additional tone is that some of us have obsessive compulsive people in our lives that once they know you are on a call and will not interrupt it, call back every 23 seconds for 10 minutes straight causing beeps and clicks and dropped words. Aggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh.