Every time I call someone’s cell phone now, and they don’t pick up, I first have to listen to a recording of that person asking me to leave a message, and then, in case I didn’t quite grasp the concept of talking into the phone, I’m presented with a plethora of options, none of which, to my knowledge, have ever been used.
Who the fuck was it decided that the average person hasn’t figured out how to operate an answering machine yet? After all, they’ve only been in widespread use for 30 years.
And the options are moronic. This is feature bloat at its worst. I don’t need to press “4” to leave a callback number. I’ll leave a callback number just as God intended, by starting my message with “Hi, this is the walrus. My number is xxx-xxx-xxxx…” Why do we need a separate option for this? I don’t need to forward a message to someone else in the system. If I’d wanted to leave a message for someone else, I would have called someone else.
Press # or hang up? I’ve never understood this. Even if I press #, I still have to hang up so why not just hang up? Am I being especially dense? I don’t get it.
While I agree with the overall moron-itude of these things, I just want to point out that some people don’t have Caller ID on their cell phones(me). At least not yet.
Also the leave call back number thing might address these problems. I’m guessing that you actually enter the call back # from the number pad and the person receiving it hears it read out in E-Z computer speak. If this is not the case, then um yeah really dumb.
Hope I haven’t pooped on your rainbow too much. Or rather, put too much rainbow into your poop pile… or something.
I think that leaving a call back number means that you just enter the number on the keypad like you used to do for a pager. That way you can just leave the number and not have to leave a verbal message. ALso, my phone will not record the phone numbers of missed calls if it is off when the calls come in.
Well, my answering machine has said the following for a couple years now:
The beep happens and then it starts recording. I thought I could skip all of the “please leave a message, I’m not in right now… BS… BS… BS.” But I’ve gotten messages from people who complain that the message is too short. Can’t please everyone.
“Feature bloat” - what a great term. We have a massive amount of this going on these days. Walk down the deodorant aisle - pit stick with moisturizer? With glitter, for freak’s sake?
Pretty common one in the software industry. The unfortunate consequence of it being much easier to sell a new product with new annoyances than it is to just sell the one that already works.
stpauler, I have the same tactic. My message is just “Walrus. Message. <beep>”
I constantly get hassled by people for the shortness of the message, but fuck 'em. Next time I have to listen to a message like
I’m going to leave the phone next to the TV and wander off somewhere for a drink.
While I have never verified that this is the same for cell phones, in several in-house phone systems I’ve used you can press # and it will give you a list of options - such as canceling/deleting the message you just left (if you suddenly had second thoughts), marking it as urgent, appending a text message, ect… Not that I think that any of this is terribly useful, but I did once use it to delete a message in which I thoughtlessly blurted out confidential information and immediately realized what a bad idea that was.
Part of the problem I’ve found is that some voicemail/answering services work in different ways. Some give an auto-beep, and start recording. Some ask you to just press a button to leave your number, and don’t record anything. Some ask you to make a few selections, and give you options to change the message/forward as a text message etc. etc.
IIRC my mobile phone voicemail is just ‘This is Sierra, I’m not available. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you’. Hubby’s is just ‘This is Chris, leave a message’. Both work.
