Every phone I’ve ever had which has the ability to mark a call as urgent, does in fact move the call to the front of the line and tells the receiver that the message is urgent.
The product manager at my former job marked every single damn message as urgent.
I have no sympathy for people leaving messages. I have sympathy for those who have to check the damn things. My new employer has the most fucked up system ever. I’ve called other people in the company so I know the system isn’t annoying for the caller. It’s only annoying for the person checking their voice mail.
It goes something like this:
Dial XXX to get to the voice mail system. This is the first annoyance. My previous work phones all allowed me to press a button to enter the mail system.
Dial my extension to access my own mail system. Makes sense.
Dial my extension AGAIN (the password :dubious: ) to actually access my own mail. What the FUCK! Everyone in the company knows that the extension is the password. It can’t be changed. Why even have a password in the first place?
Next, we have the options. It goes something like this:
“You have 296 messages. 57.5 of these are marked end of the world urgent. 33.333 of these are marked urgent.”
long pause
“Press one if you’d like to change your greeting. Press two if you’d like to change your short greeting. Press 3 if you’d like to change your answering status. Press 4 if you’d like to change your personal messaging status (I don’t even know what this is). Press 5 if you’d like to hear your messages.”
I press 5.
“Please press 1 if you’d like to delete all messages. Please press two if you’d like to exit voicemail. Please press 3 if you’d like to hear your messages.”
I press 3.
“First message is marked end of the world urgent. Please press 1 to forward this message. (Good lord someone shoot me. I haven’t even listened to the message yet. Why would I want to forward the damn thing?) Press 2 to delete this message. Press 3 to activate the self destruct system. Press 4 to bypass this oh so urgent message. Press 0 to listen to this message.”
I press 0 and listen to a 3 second message which almost always amounts to (in very thick accent of many different countries and Long Island):
(a bit of a side rant here, this is not my employer’s fault) “This is Mohammad, call me.” (this is an honest to god message I got yesterday. I’m not picking on people named Mohammad.)
Anyway, on with my rant…
Um, ok. What the fuck is your phone number? What restaurant are you calling from? Which branch of that particular franchise are you calling from? WHAT IS YOUR PHONE NUMBER? Hell, even your last name would be nice. Do you have a fucking clue how many Mohammads I talk to every day? They all own the same damn franchise you do. I CAN NOT TELL YOUR VOICES APART! (Mohammad isn’t the only one who does this though. I also get this from Bill, Mary, Ram (I have 4 of these), John (Only 2 amazingly enough).
After the message is done we have:
“Press 1 to exit voice mail. Press two to forward this message. Press 3 to listen to this message again. Press # to delete this message.”
I press #
“Are you sure you want to delete this message? If you are sure, press # followed by *. If you’re not sure, press 54902 to go back to the main menu.”
I press #*
“You have 295 messages. 56.5 of these are marked end of the world urgent. 33.333 of these are marked urgent.”
long pause
"Press one if you’d like to change your greeting. Press two if you’d like to change your short greeting. Press 3 if you’d lik…
Right about this time I decide to jump out of my second story window.
The best part of it all… I have 4 god damn mailboxes to check. There are 3 of us in customer support. We each have our own extension. But, we also have a general mailbox for the twits who can’t decide which of us they want (it doesn’t matter who they pick). We have a line specifically for people who want to add on to their existing order. We have another line specifically for people who want a creidt. Considering that credits and add ons are just about all we do, why the hell do we need 6 different lines for only 3 people? It gets better though. In order to have all these extra lines, they had to tie them to an actual phone (I have no clue why. We can access them from anywhere in the company). They chose my phone (before I came on board). So about 10 or 100 times a day, I see my message light on and proceed to check 4 different mailboxes to find out which line has the message. On my days off, my coworkers don’t see the light so no one thinks to check the messages. Then again, they don’t check them when I’m there either.