Now the Couch?! team don’t mean to seem a bunch of old fuddy-duddies, but we’ve always appreciated good manners. A please and a thank you never goes amiss, and by all means please do hold the door open for us…

So you can imagine our concern when we learnt of a new phenomenon this week -“phone rage”. Brought on by the bad manners of the person on the other end of the line, according to a poll by conference call company Powowow, the symptoms include hanging up or issuing verbal abuse to the offender.

The survey found that poor telephone manners are now such a wide-spread stressor that nearly two-thirds of us have lost it after suffering abuses such as the other person eating or burping while on the line.

The top cause of phone rage was having a call interrupted in order that the other participant might speak to someone else in the room. Eating whilst on the phone, long silences and an obvious lack of concentration shown by hearing typing at the other end, were the next three most common causes of “phone rage”.

While interrupting a call to answer a quick query may not seem the greatest phone crime, the Couch?! team were appalled to hear that some offenders even choose to conduct calls while using the lavatory! The Couch?! team are getting hot under the collar just thinking about it… Knowing that sharing is an important part of diffusing stress, the Couch?! would love to hear your tales of telephone bad manners, simply click on add comments below.

To get you started we’ve listed a few of the most common misdemeanours:
* Being made to feel like office entertainment by pointlessly being put on loudspeaker (yes we can always tell).
* Feeling like a parrot by having to repeat things.
* Being temporarily deafened by unnecessary shouting down the line (why do some people think that they need to help the technology by speaking as loudly as possible?)
* Call sorting systems – why is it so impossible to get through to a human being?
* Looped hold music, only “enhanced” with the electronic voice that keeps interupting the rendition of Greensleeves to inform you how valued your call is.