I have to hop
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Conference Call Anatomy™
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Triago: Good colleagues: there are but twenty minutes left. Wouldst you thy precious time reclaim; Or may we keep afoot our infinite game — With more, or any other, business? Search anew, What items canst be tabled without ado? Gloucester: Nothing sire. Kent: Nor from I.
- A period of silence around the table.
Queen (aside): That irksome twerp. A world of richness awaits this piffling parley. Triago: How say you, brave Herculio? What agenda fodder doth the gods portend? Herculio: The gods? The gods? Methinks you jest. Th’almighty has no use for paltry conference. Triago: I think he does, sirrah! Queen: Oh, ho! How so? What matters lie upon thy parchèd record That be yet unbeknownst to sacred mind? Whose cogs and toothèd gears Whose immaculate escapements All history — gone and yet to come — defined? What need hath she, or he Who bid the lion lay with lamb For this dismal convention? Nuncle: Thou maketh me to meet — Therefore I am. Triago: How should I know, my Queen? How should I know? Queen: Quite so, good sir, quite so. I must away. Maketh thou the time-ball drop.
- Exit Queen
Herculio: With all my heart, my Liege — One has to hop.
- Exeunt
- —Otto Büchstein, Die Schweizer Heulsuse
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.”