I have to hop

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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 you are currently doing is attending a conference call, it’s a matter of irrefutable mathematical logic that you have something better to do; even head-butting a filing cabinet would count — but in announcing your need to hop without saying whither, you don’t commit yourself to anything upon which an unemancipated fellow call-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 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 moderator’s monologue to engineer a similar exit” — so it is not done to ask such pointed questions.

You can, of course, give a reason and thereby commit yourself as a matter of heroic resistance, or even spite: the most devastating of which is, “I have to hop: I have an industry call”. This is the office worker’s equivalent of, “Look, I’d love to stop and chat but we have to go and wait in the lobby.”

See also

• Industry call