World's Worst Phone

There are several companies that I don't like for various reasons: bad customer service, unreasonably high prices, defective products.  But, in my mind, worse than all others is LG.  I have to preface this story by stating that everything in it is true; if I were making this up, I would be much less frustrated with where I work now.  

My old phone, the world's worst phone, was an LG.  At first I really liked the phone; it had a qwerty keyboard - this was a couple years ago - and was much easier to type on than my phone before it.  What I later found out was that while the phone may have done many things well, it completely failed to display any symbol when I had a voice-mail.  Most of the time this wasn't a big deal.  Because of caller ID, I could see who had called and guess whether he or she had left a message.  Of course, there were some calls where the caller ID said "unknown," but these were invariably telemarketers who I simply ignored.  

In the spring of 2009, my last year of law school and business school, I was excited for the future.  I had received multiple job offers and was feeling lucky to have employment in such an uncertain economy.  Despite my success in my job search, I was still applying for careers that I thought would be more exciting or highly paid.  One of the places I applied to was the National Clandestine Service division of the CIA.  

At that time, the CIA was undergoing a large recruitment drive at business schools and the University of Iowa was one place they held an event.    At the presentation two people with fake names gave the highlights of what potential new employees would be doing: after training, new agents would do at least a year long tour in a hostile environment before being reassigned to a safer place.  I should explain.  The vast majority of what the CIA does is fairly boring; most of their workers are economists and engineers who rarely leave metropolitan Washington DC.  National Clandestine Service operatives are the actual spies; they are stationed overseas and given a cover job at an embassy or a front-business.  Clandestine Services agents do not have diplomatic cover.  One such agent was Valerie Plame, the CIA agent outed by the Bush Administration, another is Robert Baer, who was the basis for George Clooney's character in Syriana.  This is real James Bond type stuff.  What little boy's dream wasn't to be a secret agent?  Even though my future career as an attorney had a much smaller risk of death or torture, I logged on to the CIA's website and applied without hesitation.  

A couple weeks later my phone rang.  The caller ID said "unknown" so I ignored the called having been conditioned to believe that I was avoiding a telemarketer.  Over the next two weeks this happened three more times.  Over the following two weeks I had not missed any calls from anyone who would have left a voice-mail and as a result had not checked my voices messages for over a month.  Finally, I missed a call from my parents and checked my voice mail.  I had five new messages.  One was from my dad. 

The other four all had the exact same message.  A female voice said, "Mr. Slavik, I am calling about the application that you filled out online.  We would like to speak with you.  Please call 202 -***-**** and ask for Karen."  The message did not say who it was from and did not give "Karen's" last name. 

After hearing the messages I was thrilled and furious.  I was thrilled because I knew 202 was a Washington DC area code and the CIA was the only job that I applied to in that area.  I was angry because it was now several weeks after the messages were left and my damn phone never told me I had a message.  I quickly called the number the message gave.  

I woman picked up the phone and said, "recruiting."  I explained how I had received a message asking me to call the number and ask for Karen.  I was then transfered to a answering machine with a message that did not identify who the machine belonged to.  I gave my name, phone number, and explained why it took me so long to call.

I am not a religious person, but I prayed that "Karen" would call back.  She never did.  Now I can only curse LG and wonder at what might have been.