phone tag

the process where you try to call someone and only get their answering machine. they in turn get the message and call you only to get your voice mail. repeat until one of you give up.
when you call someone, and they miss your call. then they call back, and you miss their call.
dammit, i tried to call jennifer, but she was asleep. then she called me back when i was in the shower! we’ve been playing phone tag all morning.
a silly little game where one bored person calls another and says “tag youre it”; the receiver of the call then continues the game by calling another person, and so on. the game ends when an annoyed person who has received five calls from five different people decides to not call anyone, thereby discontinuing the chain of phone calls. one can keep from receiving multiple phone calls by saying “no tag backs” to the person who calls.
stephanie got called five times in one game of phone tag because she forgot to say “no tag backs”.
phone tag is where you have to leave voice messages in order to get information of some kind, usually directions or info about an appointment, an interview, or an event.
phone tag can be quite irritating because of the difficulty in being able to talk to the person who has important information where time and deadlines are relevant. phone tag, to some extent, explain why many people preferred emails and then texts, because a voice message usually requires that you have to write something down anyway.