> If you're being paid by your employer to attend meetings, what phone call could possibly be so important that you can't let it go to voicemail and you get to it after the meeting?
A family member is suddenly in critical condition in the hospital? Your spouse was kidnapped on a business trip and is being held for ransom? Use your pretentious old school imagination.
Obviously emergencies are an exception, but for the meetings I've been in, the phone calls that I've seen my peers take have never been an emergency. They are people taking calls from their friends, their significant others, their mortgage broker, their mechanic, etc.
The worst is when they start talking on the phone even before they leave the meeting room, and disrupt the meeting.
A family member is suddenly in critical condition in the hospital? Your spouse was kidnapped on a business trip and is being held for ransom? Use your pretentious old school imagination.