I hate voicemail. If I don’t answer the phone and you want to contact me, e-mail me. By the time I’m done listening to your message, I probably will have forgotten half of what you said in it anyway.
I have two different voicemail systems that I have to deal with: Work: I generally will listen to your message the same day you leave it. The phone doesn’t record missed calls, so I can’t just call back hang-ups. Thankfully, it does automatically delete messages after two weeks, so I don’t have to do that. Cell phone: I almost never listen to messages. My family knows this, so most of the messages I get are from a car salesman that I unwisely gave my number to. I call back most missed calls (from people I know, obviously).
I also don’t leave messages. If you don’t answer, I’ll try another phone number, or just call again later.
No. I like being called. I just don’t like worthless messages.
Did. This does nothing. As noted above, people leave voicemails when the person on the outgoing message is someone they don’t even know; they’re certainly not going to pay attention to what the person actually says.
No. Occasionally someone leaves me a useful message. I want to get those. It’d just be nice if I didn’t get the other ones.
Have. My argument here would be that my preferences make more sense. Why the hell would anyone want a caller to leave them a message solely to indicate that the caller wants to speak to them? The fact that the person called them tells them that much. As I said, you wouldn’t email me to tell me to send you an email, so why leave a phone message to do the same thing?
No rage involved, just a minor inconvenience that could be quite easily avoided.
Could be that you don’t receive the same quantity of useless messages as some folks in this thread. Could be that you have a great love for pressing ‘7’ twenty times in a row. Sure, it’s nothing to freak out about, but hey, since someone brought it up, might as well talk about it.
Maybe she didn’t want to wade through her umpteen thousand “Hi, I called you!” messages to get to yours. Frustrating, but I can sympathize with both parties.
I disagree. I think my preferences make more sense.
If you don’t leave a message, that means to me you just wanted to BS or needed something then and there but, since I didn’t answer, you called someone else. You will not be in my priority list for returning phone calls, and I may not return a phone call unless I wanted to talk to you anyway.
When you leave a message, this bumps you up on the priority list. It means to me that you eventually want to talk to me, that it wasn’t just a random call to BS, or you have some particularly good BS you want to share with me.
If you leave a detailed message, you will be top priority for my call backs.
Simply calling and not leaving a message means “not important, don’t bother calling back” to me. If I call anybody and don’t leave a message, I do not expect a call back. In general, this rule is pretty well-followed among the people I interact with.
One & a half pages, and I’m the only one who gets in a frothing fury about the idiot who identifies himself as “Me”?
When I get voicemails, especially at work, saying “call me back” I would be more than happy to call you back to tell you that you’re a little weasel-dicked moron, if only I knew who the fuck you might be!
Caller ID or no, I have better things to do than to memorize every fucking phone number in the world and to whom it belongs. I can usually deduce what the hell you want, but only if you tell me who the fuck you are!
Why on earth would I take the fact that you called me as an indication of anything other than the fact that you called me? It doesn’t logically follow that my calling you means that I want or need you to call me back.
It’s pretty fucking annoying when I call someone who’s asked for a piece of information and leave that information on their voice mail, only to have them call me and say “what’s up? You called me.” What’s up is that you should listen to your damn voice mail. If you have a question, then call me back. Otherwise, quit bugging me.
I think we actually agree with each other more than it seems. No message does indeed mean that a callback is optional, but if the only reason you were calling was to leave a two-second message to tell me you called me, then you don’t really need to talk to me and a callback (and, therefore, the message) is unnecessary. Leaving a detailed message earns you a call back under my way of thinking as well. I would love it if more people left detailed messages…it’s the “hey, I called you” messages I don’t want.
The people who call you and don’t leave a message, because they’re calling just to BS, are the same sort of people who DO leave me a message even though they’re just calling me to BS (or, in Dave’s case, to ask me the same question he asks me every day). Imagine if every one of those people left you a message telling you to call them back, and nothing else, and I think you’ll understand where I’m coming from.
Why would you call someone if you don’t want to talk to them? Or is it that you want to talk to them now, but only now, and talking to them at a later time is undesirable? (No snark, it’s a serious question…I don’t get how calling someone isn’t an indication that you want to speak with them at some point.)
And I’ll go against the grain on brief “call me back” voicemails. I don’t mind them. I tend to prefer short messages. And a “call me back” tells me that whatever you need from me requires actual dialog, that you need to talk to me. I’d prefer the detailed stuff in my email (or maybe in a text message).
Cell rings: I need/want to talk to you now.
Missed call/no message: You don’t need to return my call
“Call me back”: I still need/want to talk to you.
I guess if I got a ton of “call me backs” that were just time wasters, I’d feel differently, but I don’t.
That is the number one reason that I canceled my service with Verizon. Sometimes I would only have 30 seconds or so to check my VM, and I ended up hanging up before I could even listen to my new messages, because I was stuck listening to all of my saved messages, which took up the short amount of time that I had.
–Yesterday, I was chatting with a coworker about a small problem she was having. I called a friend with significant expertise in the area for an opinion. If my friend hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have needed him to call me back because the information was relevant right then, and it was all not a big enough deal to warrant a multi-day discussion.
–Calling to tell someone something like “the party starts at 6:00.” I don’t need to talk to them. I just need to give them that information.
–Calling someone by accident when you meant to call someone else.
What’s really irksome is when people respond to “missed calls” without listening to voice mail in a business context. Like if I call a sales rep and say “I need a price on item 123,” and instead of listening to the voice mail and calling me back with the information in hand, they call me back and ask me what I want. I ask them for the price on item 123, and they either have to call me back again to give me the information, or I have to wait on hold while they look it up.
Er…yeah, plenty of outrage in this here thread about a personal peeve. I must admit, though, dismissively spouting off a couple of strawmen and taking your leave is quite the argument. I guess I just got owned.
“Outrage”? The closest thing I see to that is a single poster annoucing in a self-superior huff that she’s leaving the thread.
Beyond that, none of your proposed solutions to the “problem” – which is less of a problem and more of an extremely minor personal annoyance, and I really don’t see anyone claiming otherwise – work. Two of them are stupid (getting rid of the phone and getting rid of voicemail), and if the others worked, the “problem” wouldn’t exist in the first place.
Just out of curiosity, why don’t those of you who hate voicemail change your outgoing message to say “DON’T LEAVE A MESSAGE: you can email me at XXX or text me. I don’t check voicemail.”
Only those people with something important to say who aren’t near a computer and don’t have a cellphone will leave messages. Or morons.
Much as I think this is a stupid rant, changing your outgoing message is a good idea that won’t solve the problem. My outgoing message on my work phone number is clear that a) you should send an email and where to send it and b) that I never answer the phone, it’s strictly a voicemail line.
Most people leave voicemail anyway, despite being told not to. And very often I get something akin to ‘I’ll try again later, I guess’. I don’t know if they skip past the message, or just zone it out, but they sure don’t listen to it.
As far as I can tell, most of the people arguing in this thread aren’t arguing with each other. Some of the people attacking the OP are reading points into it that just aren’t there (for example, hating all voicemail, or the belief that every call always merits a call back); some of the people defending it are being too hyperbolic (at least I hope it’s hyperbole) about their emotional investment into voicemail, which is causing the attacking side to think they’re lunatics.
With that in mind, does anyone involved disagree with any of the following statements?
[ol]
[li]Voicemail, used properly, is a good thing.[/li][li]Leaving a message detailing the reason for the call is proper use of voicemail.[/li][li]If a detailed message is left, a callback is warranted.[/li][li]If the call has no particular purpose, a voicemail is not needed.[/li][li]If the call has no particular purpose, a callback is not needed.[/li][li]If a voicemail is not left, it can assumed that a callback is not needed.[/li][/ol]
The majority seem to agree on those, and are stating them back and forth at one another as if they contradict each other. Except for one person who hates voicemail altogether, nobody on either side is contradicting points 1 through 3, and those who have felt compelled to defend those points are tilting at windmills and/or deliberately being assholes. The OP is asserting 4 and, as far as I can tell, assuming 5 and 6. Some folks seem to believe that the OP’s defenders do not agree with 5 or 6, but I don’t see anyone suggesting that a callback is merited for every single call regardless of whether a voicemail is left…only that, if they already know what the call is about or they want to speak with the caller anyway, they will call back without a voicemail instructing them to do so.
The driving point, though, is 4, with the added conclusion that voicemails that say nothing are mildly annoying, especially in large quantities. That’s pretty much it, really. We cool?
(Yes, I’m aware that I’ve spent far too much time and energy analysing an argument over voicemail, but hell, what else is this board for?)
Okay, taken literally, I can see that. Personally, I would read that as “I’m going to call you back [or not call you back] anyway.” In other words, if you leave him a content-free voicemail, it won’t make him any more or less likely to call you back, so you might as well not bother.
I’ll admit that I might be giving him too much credit with that interpretation, but it was MY point, anyway.
I never leave a content-free voicemail, but if I want someone to call me back, I say “Call me back.” If I don’t, then I don’t leave a message. I can’t understand why anyone would stay with a phone plan where they milk minutes out of you whenever you use your voicemail, and I don’t think much of getting content-free calls from people saying, “Hey, you called me.”
Sure, it’s nothing to freak out about, but hey, since someone brought it up, might as well talk about it.