For a long time, my voicemail wasn’t set up. People got mad at me.
So I setup my voicemail, and now it has a greeting. But I don’t listen to messages. People get mad at me again.
The trouble with voicemail is its just too inefficient. I have to dial-in, wait for it to connect, listen to the rambling, and then act on it. The whole process is quite maddening – 20-30 seconds each! I know that at this very moment I have voicemails from my sister and brother, and I even have spare time. But the mere thought of the painful process makes me not do it. I’d rather write a whole blog post about how I hate listening to voicemail.
Hmm… I wonder how many messages I’ve got queued up?
I hear ya. I learned that lesson last year when my family complained that they were getting the “this users inbox is full” message. So I cleared it out and changed the greeting to say “Hi, if you leave a message here I probably won’t ever listen to it. Try something else.”
Uh – dude. Google Voice. No, not for actually reading your transcribed messages, because that is simply impossible. But rather, Google Voice transcriptions, automatically emailed to you, provide endless hours of honest-to-goodness ROFLYAO times.
Or rather:
——-
Up dope. Goobly Void. No, not for intelly reebing yous transmission cribbed massages, betwat pickle slightly responsible. Boot panda, Goobly Void transmissional, allergenically emailed for you, pronouce M less are’s of opist two goopness SPGMZBP thymes.
Well, yeah, what he said, the transcriptions are funny, but then you can just click ‘play’ on the email google voice sends you to hear the message. The days of ‘dialing in for voicemail’ are gone.
And its free, and works with any phone/plan.
That is the main reason why I stopped paying for voice mail 5 years ago. I just moved to Mountain View from Canada, and Google Voice’s voice mail is pretty great, just sends me an email and I like it. Before, Canada usually places a limit on how many in your inbox for voice mail, so it is always full which caused me even more frustration when reading them. So I just read them while eating lunch as background noise.
Yes, there is a message from me…. but I was driving and didn’t want to risk texting you and getting a ticket! You should just change your message to say: “Hi, you’ve reached Mike Belshe’s voice mail box. If you want to be sure that I won’t respond, leave a message now. However, if you want me to contact you, text or email me… it is much more efficient!”
Yeah, my voicemail message has instructed people to send me email for years. Happily, visual voicemail on both Android and iPhone is pretty efficient when people don’t listen to instructions. Just click “play”, listen to the first 5 or 10 seconds, hit delete…
I agree listening to voicemail is archaic and lame. Its not the dial in or anything. Why would I sit and listen to someone drone at me when they could have sent me a one line text message that I could have read in less than a second?
I dont set up my voicemail box, havent for years.
The next thing Im going to get rid of altogether is email, Im almost there, 10K unread messages and counting. Someday people will learn.