I have to hop
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Conference Call Anatomy™
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Also known as: I need to drop.
The line one rolls out when one can no longer bear an all-hands conference call, but there is no less brazen way of engineering an exit.
It implies you have something better to do — let’s face it; if what one is currently doing is attending a conference call, it's a matter of irrefutable mathematical logic that one has something better to do; even head-butting a filing cabinet would count — but doesn’t commit you to articulating anything upon which an unemancipated fellow participant could pass judgment. It would be an act of passive aggression beyond the pale, even for the most resentful project manager, to enquire to what a departing participant feels obliged to hop, and anyway, each other participants, mutely admiring the departee, will be thinking, “there but for the grace of God go I” — indeed, “there with the grace of God will go I as soon as I can contrive an appropriate pause in the moderators monologue to engineer a similar exit” — so it is not done to ask such pointed questions.
There are more or less snarky variations of this expression, the best of which is “I have to hop: I have an industry call” — the office worker’s equivalent of, “Look, I’d love to stop and chat but I have to go and wait in the lobby.”