On the topic of good communication, I have a huge pet peeve with something that I find super common with phone calls, at least over here in South Africa (I don't know what it might be like elsewhere).<p>Almost any time I get a call from any business, almost always from numbers don't recognize, 99% of the time the first thing the other person says to me is "Hello, how are you?".<p>When this happens, my first internal thought is "Excuse me, but do I know you?".<p>I don't think it's some deliberate sales strategy of cold callers, I suspect it's that they think of it like an in person conversation where this is perfectly acceptable with a stranger, except they fail to consider that I as the caller recipient have absolutely zero context of who I'm talking to and it's likely to piss off someone who is in a meeting or otherwise has a lot of work to do.<p>The <i>professional</i> way for someone from a business to phone you is to announce where they are calling from and what the call is in regards to, something like "Hello, I'm calling from Acme in regards to...", or "Hi, I'm Bob from Acme and I'm calling in regards to ..., how are you today?".<p>This way, I can instantly know whether or not it is someone from a business I have a pre-existing relationship with that I actually <i>do</i> probably want to talk to, as opposed to the more common caller who is cold calling me in an attempt to get me to buy something from them.<p>So when I get a call with "Hello, how are you?", I've now taken to responding with "Sorry, would you please first tell me where you're calling from?".<p>Then I'm either very friendly if it's a company I know, or for other companies I don't know I just state plainly "I don't have a pre-existing relationship with your company so I suspect this is a sales call and I don't have time calls such as these. Goodbye." and I hang up before the person even has a chance to respond.