All the rage

It was only a simple bit of information you needed. But by the end of the morning you have been baffled by automated switchboards, put through to voicemails or pagers, been put on hold, cut off by Call Waiting, and finally been given a mobile phone number only to find the signal is too bad to hear anything. It's no wonder by the time you hear a human voice you explode with suppressed anger.

You are not alone, according to a new report. Around two-thirds of 500 organisations polled by Reed Employment Services felt that phone rage had increased over the past five years, and nearly six out of ten people said they had lost their tempers on the phone. Most likely to shorten fuses are an insincere or unconcerned tone of voice followed by being kept waiting or passed on to voicemail.

It's all to do with increased demand, it seems. The number of telephone calls has risen from 80 million a day five years ago to over 100 million now, while the growth of our demanding consumer society has created increasingly high expectations.

"Not many years ago you would write a letter and you wouldn't expect to have a reply for a few days," says Charles Sutton, consultant with corporate psychologists Nicholson McBride. "Now with e-mails, mobile phones, voicemail, our expectations have been raised and we expect our problems solved much quicker."

"But although expectations are heightened and the promises may also be heightened, the delivery is not necessarily there," he adds. "And because we no longer have the luxury of face-to-face contact, only voice to voice, you see the voice as the front of the company and it's easier to fall into the condition of phone rage."

The Reed survey found that while 65 per cent of people were most likely to express anger over the phone, only 9 per cent would do so face to face. "It's a less threatening situation," says Sutton. "And also you can't pick up on non-verbal signals, which you could do so if you met someone."

Maggie Dawson, managing director ofManaging Development, a business consultancy, agrees that distance can complicate matters: "If you are writing something down or referring to a colleague, tell the caller exactly what you are doing," she says. "If you are dealing with an angry caller, try to adopt the same rhythm and energy as the person on the other end of the line - without shouting back! The old advice about being passive and quiet is a sure fire way of making people angrier."

Many companies have tried to deal with the problem. Seventy per cent of organisations now make a formal telephone greeting mandatory compared to less than half five years ago. Nearly half of companies now insist that the staff give their names when they answer the telephone, and nearly a third give training on telephone technique.

For the bank First Direct, which conducts all its business over the phone, such training now takes up half of the seven to eight weeks that it takes to groom its banking representatives. "We obviously have to concentrate quite hard on communication techniques as well as the banking techniques we teach them," said Lisa Cornofsky. "I would say the emphasis is on communicating effectively with our customers. We don't have any golden rules as such but we say things like always smile - I know it sounds a bit naff - and always remain calm and efficient. We don't actually give out our names except if asked because we now have 1200 people working for us and it would just take too long if customers started to ask for people by name."

But while we snarl into the receiver expecting others to be available instantly for us, at the same time we are desperate to be less available ourselves. When we're frustrated with someone else it's phone rage, but when we are the victims it turns into "communications stress".

The problem, thinks Neil Crawford, a psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic, is that we are swamped with junk mail and non-urgent phone calls while remaining terrified of missing the all-important message.

Insecure executives are feeling the need to take their mobile phones on holiday with them to palm-lined beaches or Tuscan olive groves so that they are accessible at all times - Cellnet says that calls made on the GSM network (which allows a mobile phone to be used outside its home country) have risen by 151 per cent in the past two years, with particular increases in summer traffic between Britain, Spain and Portugal. It recalls the scene in Woody Allen's Play It Again Sam where Diane Keaton tells her workaholic husband he should give the office the number of the pay phone they were passing in case he is needed.

Meanwhile, a survey of 1,000 workers in the United States revealed that 1,000 workers receive an average of 178 e-mail messages a day - many of which have absolutely no relevance. A recent survey for Reuters confirmed that similar problems exist in Britain, with workers claiming to waste an hour a day responding to pointless e-mails.

This week most people have reacted with fear and loathing to the news that a mobile phone is being developed by British Telecom that will send precise details of the caller's location to the person receiving the call. Workers will no longer be able to phone the office pretending to be sick when they are at the beach and adulterous spouses will be able to be located to within 30 feet.

Add to this the pager that can reach you at all times or the boss who has your mobile number, and the prospect of any peace and quiet at all vanishes. Mobile phone companies may increasingly boast of their extended coverage, but the user is left feeling there is nowhere to hide.

"The truth is the phone can be very intrusive, it can feel like persecution if people misuse the instrument," says Neil Crawford. "Unnecessary memos, unnecessary junk mail and all the other things - you have to be able to see what is important and what is clutter.

"And although our technology gives a huge advantage on, say, 100 years ago, we must remember it doesn't replace face-to-face relationships. People think it can but it can't. By attempting to bypass face to face it's just not the same. It doesn't have the same impact."

But he thinks we are beginning to fight back by subverting the technology that was invented to make us more accessible by using it to make us more elusive. "There is no question that the social etiquette is changing to adapt," says Mr Crawford. "People are trying to get a balance between availability and protecting their privacy. By and large people do respect this privacy, although some people don't care and think their needs are all-important.

"People are making decisions as to whether meetings should be free from interruption, which is the sort of thing that can make people very angry. We are making the ways in which we are contactable more selective through voice mails and pagers. You now find that people aren't having answerphones so that they are not obliged to return calls. Or they use it to take numbers and screen their calls so they can select out who they wish to speak to. And after all, you don't have to buy a pager"n