Author John Scalzi has decided that he is killing his voice mail. I’m completely on his side in this, and I think that perhaps it’s time to make it official.
I have three voice mailboxes: my personal cell phone, my office line, and my home line. On my personal cell, if the voicemail is left by someone I know, I almost never listen to it. I look at the number and decide when I’m going to call them back (or communicate in some other way, usually text or email). If it’s not left by someone I know, there’s maybe a 50/50 chance of me listening to it. Maybe.
On my home line, voicemail is this vast wasteland of nothingness. I can’t tell you the last time that I listened to it. I check its caller list to see who’s called lately, but that’s it.
My office voicemail is one that I actively hate. It’s a hassle to use. I have to remember my PIN, and then navigate an idiotic menu system (“press 1 to listen to your voicemail”, “press 1 to listen to your messages” why?!), and then listen to the message. If I miss the important information in the message (like a telephone number), I have to listen to the whole bloody message again. And, possibly, again. And then I can delete it. Once I’ve listened to and deleted all of my messages, my voicemail starts playing me my deleted messages automatically. I have utterly no idea why.
I think it’s time to officially put this policy into play. This means figuring out how to record a message on my work voicemail.
The fact that you have to press 1 and 1 again to listen to your office voicemail messages is not a problem of voicemail per se, but one of the system your employer chose to use. I am sure there are much more user friendly systems than the one you have to use.
I actually like voicemail a lot. It is my best friend, because I turn off my phone often during the work day to get some work done. My greeting ends with “…please leave a message.” – I never set the expectation to call back, so there is no pressure. (In fact, I always call back.)
The one service I really wished I could use is a speech-2-text service which sends the text of the voicemail as an email to me. Vodafone used to have this as a trial service in my region, but they stopped it. I loved that one.
Well, yes, I’ve also had better voicemail experiences than the one that our employer chooses to use. This is especially maddening given that our mail server does actually support speech-to-text, which I’ve had in the past (such as my prior employer) and liked because it gave me all of the information that I needed in a much more consumable format. Here in the US, Google Voice also provides speech-to-text; I’m not sure if they do that overseas.
I think I still have the instructions from when I set up mine, and a very helpful soul figured out the email sync instructions for this site.
I’ve done away with voicemail completely, I’ve disabled it on both my work and personal mobile phones. It’s something I’ve felt compelled to do ever since I ended up getting lots of cold calls from ambulance chasers (who for some reason seem to think I’ve had an accident that’s not my fault). The only accident like that has been to end up on their list. As they appear to be using robo-dialers I ended up with a lot of empty voicemails, that combined with a death-threat left on my voicemail a few years ago finally pushed me over the edge.
If people need me urgently they usually phone back or contact me in another way (SMS / email). It worked in the days before voicemail and nowadays there are so many more ways of contacting me without having to resort to the low quality of voicemail)