David Maina is the managing consultant of Perfometer Agribusiness Consulting House, on the board of iServe Africa, and a regular contributor to Conversation Magazine. Here are some excerpts from his most recent piece…

I cannot claim to be an expert in matters of phone etiquette. But as a mobile phone user for twelve years now, I have an opinion on these matters…

Receiving a call and whispering back to the caller “I am in a meeting” is at best unscholarly and at worst disrespectful… There is no stronger way to say that you are in a meeting, than to let an incoming call graduate into a missed call…

From a communication perspective, it must be noted that, the caller does not call to find out where the receiver is, no! This kind of response “I am in a meeting” in fact costs the receiver more than letting the incoming call graduate into a missed call. And yet, it does not give the receiver any more value than a missed call, to that extent it’s a lose-lose for both the caller and the receiver. This is with the exception of very rare circumstances where the caller calls to find whether the receiver is alive, in those cases, the whisper does it all.

[Read the full article in Conversation Magazine Issue 3.]