I have to admit that I am very bad about checking voice mail. In this day and age, I have become a true texter. If I miss a call I will text the person back to see what they wanted. It is a learned behavior and it saves me time. By texting, I can get a direct answer vs. a long drawn out story when I really don't have time to chat.
I finally checked voice mail today and heard a message from this past Sunday. It was from a friend of a friend and it turns out that the message was not even for me. The message was for my roommate. Why am I getting a message on my phone for my roommate? Well, my roommate is deaf, but I should not be getting messages for him when he has his own communication devices.
The message for my roommate was that his friend was not going to make the appointment she set up with him earlier in the week. Well instead of contacting him directly, she calls my phone and leaves a message for me to tell him that she can not make it. Once I heard the message which was Wednesday, I sent my roommate a message stating that she did call to say that she could not make it last Sunday.
After giving her voice mail message some thought, I became offended. She made the appointment and it was her sole responsibility to let him know that she was not going to make it. She passed her responsibilities onto me which was not fair. I had nothing to do with the appointment other than help him prepare for it the day before. I would not have minded if she made an effort to contact him herself while using me as a back up to ensure that he got the message, but she did not. She chose what was convenient for her at the time disregarding everyone else. He was actually doing her a favor, but ended up wasting his time by waiting on her to show up.
I know it would have taken just a little more effort to send him a text message, but it would have been the right thing to do in my opinion. If she did not have time to text or did not know how to text, there was other options. She could have sent an email to his Blackberry or Sidekick. She could had emailed him at home or sent him an offline message using AIM. She could have done a relay call using 711 which is a process that she is very familiar with from work.
In short, she disregarded her responsibilities to her own friend by opting for the easiest way to save herself some time. The effort that she made was less than adequate and if I was grading her on it, she would receive an "E".
