Answering Machine in the clerks' office?
Posted: Sun Jan 02, 2011 11:16 am
I was at the church on a normal weekday morning before work doing some year end financial stuff and the phone rang. It was a brother moving into the ward from out of state and he had initially intended to leave a message, not expecting someone to be at the church.
I ended up having a pleasant conversation with him, and passed along the necessary phone numbers and information (and got his details, too).
However, all of this left a question in my mind: is it okay to have an answering machine in the clerks' office? (especially for cases like this?) I have an "old" answering machine at home that I can donate, but I didn't know if this sort of thing was okay.
I can only imagine it being okay if perhaps no messages could be left on the machine, and instead it played a recording stating the ward's name, the Sunday meeting time, and giving the bishop's phone number? (just like people can look up the information on the maps.lds.org site, perhaps the recording would just have the exact same information?)
Anyhow, the brother said he was only able to find the clerks' office phone number and no other number (perhaps because he wasn't using the new maps.lds.org site, but instead found our ward through wards.lds.org... our wards.lds.org home page has the clerks' office phone number on it).
Actually, I might have answered my own question: we probably don't need an answering machine with a message (who is going to get that phone number anyway?) instead we could probably just make sure the same information on maps.lds.org shows up on our ward's page on wards.lds.org.
(I'm still curious what people think about the answering machine though...I'm kind of leaning in the direction of "less is more").
Thanks!
I ended up having a pleasant conversation with him, and passed along the necessary phone numbers and information (and got his details, too).
However, all of this left a question in my mind: is it okay to have an answering machine in the clerks' office? (especially for cases like this?) I have an "old" answering machine at home that I can donate, but I didn't know if this sort of thing was okay.
I can only imagine it being okay if perhaps no messages could be left on the machine, and instead it played a recording stating the ward's name, the Sunday meeting time, and giving the bishop's phone number? (just like people can look up the information on the maps.lds.org site, perhaps the recording would just have the exact same information?)
Anyhow, the brother said he was only able to find the clerks' office phone number and no other number (perhaps because he wasn't using the new maps.lds.org site, but instead found our ward through wards.lds.org... our wards.lds.org home page has the clerks' office phone number on it).
Actually, I might have answered my own question: we probably don't need an answering machine with a message (who is going to get that phone number anyway?) instead we could probably just make sure the same information on maps.lds.org shows up on our ward's page on wards.lds.org.
(I'm still curious what people think about the answering machine though...I'm kind of leaning in the direction of "less is more").
Thanks!