I bet she can reach everyone she needs to reach.
Possibly.
There are people who won’t use anything but text. There are people who won’t use anything but actually answering the phone. There are people who never answer the phone. There are people who have what appears to be functioning email but never check it. There are people who expect everybody to know whatever they posted on Facebook. Or on Instagram. Or whatever.
What annoys me unreasonably is that there’s no one agreed upon way to get ahold of everybody. Preferably not involving a hold line, at least not of more than five minutes.
I guess that’s why this thread is titled the way it is. Next up: Stores that don’t accept checks, wtf!?
As to your option 2, that’s someone who simply doesn’t use voicemail. So it fills with untouched VMs until full. Then it remains full.
As to your option 1, that’s someone who simply doesn’t use voicemail.
Perhaps they set it up once, but every couple years it seems cellular companies rework their VM and you need to re-setup your voicemail. But if you never use it, how would you know it’s been reset? And if you have established the habit of never using voicemail and you get a new phone, get a new job, whatever, and therefore knowingly have a new voicemail, why would you set up something you won’t ever listen to? A dead voicemail box at least isn’t head-faking the caller. So you’re doing your callers a favor by leaving it un-setup.
I agree w @thorny_locust’s larger point that now that we have 20 communication channels, everyone uses their own personal subset of them with no obvious rhyme, reason, nor clear default winner for all of us.
Yes, it’s annoying.
What annoys me is how many people treat texts and other messages as live phone conversations. I thought the original point of messaging is that you don’t bother someone with a phone/video call. They can read your message when they have time and respond when they have time.
It’s not how AOL Instant Messenger and other IM services used to be - when someone purposely logged on for chatting (unless they put up an “away note”).
I had one acquaintance who was afraid to text some of her friends in the afternoon because it might be their child’s nap time and she would hate to wake their child. Why don’t they set their phones on silent/turn the phones off?
Also hear people complain about being texted at 7:00 AM or some other time. Or someone says “I don’t want to text [person] at 6:30 when they’re trying to relax after work.” Again, shouldn’t that person mute/turn off the phone?
Some people need to leave their phones on and can’t put them on silent. I can usually ignore it and go right back to sleep when I see it’s not my 86 year old mother calling/texting me at 2 am. Not everybody can. I don’t generally get annoyed unless it’s my husband’s friends texting each other their solutions at 6 am or something like that,
It’s trivial on modern phones to configure some contacts to ring or beep through while everything else is silenced. No reason your aged Mom, et al can’t be ring-through contact(s) while your phone is otherwise silent.
It’s also trivial to set your phone up to go to silent at e.g. 9pm and go loud again at 7am. Even if your schedule is variable, as mine is, that wipes out most of the problem with no need for you to remember to silence it every night or un-silence it every morning.
Today I took an afternoon nap. I know those take real close to 90 minutes of sleep plus some fall asleep time. Push the button for silent mode to expire in 2 hours. Even if I forget immediately after I wake up, soon enough the noises are live again.
All this is easy; jus a matter of folks choosing to use the tools given to them.
I don’t answer unknown numbers. 99% of the times it’s spam. If you are a legit person calling for a real reason, leave me a voicemail and I will call back. If you don’t, then clearly it was not actually anything important.
(And the few times when it was a legit call, they did leave voicemails. So yes people absolutely use voicemail.)
So I would have to go through 30 voicemails to find the legitimate one. I might as well answer the unknown caller calls!
Like @Eyebrows_0f_Doom, it’s my experience that spam/unknown calls rarely leave voicemails. If I see a new voicemail in my inbox, I will listen to it, and it’s almost always legit. If not, I delete it. And every week or so, I go through my inbox and delete the voicemails that are no longer needed.
The EMT who called to tell me that my mother was refusing to go to the hospital unless I told her to would, these days, have been calling from their number, not hers.
Most of them don’t leave voicemails.
Neither do ANY humans I interact with. Zero. None. Nada. Zilch.
Your experience is different.
You’re pissed off because some third person doesn’t behave like you want them to. Perhaps is because their experience is different from yours.
I don’t think you’re an idiot. I think your experience and priorities are different than mine. You should consider that the experiences and priorities of the person you’re enraged are different from yours.
Unfortunately the phone system is broken in this country. Anyone (a computer in India, Russia, Cambodia) can place a call at zero cost. The signal to noise ratio is ridiculous. That is the experience of lots of people.
Reminds me of the scene in Tex, the Passive-Aggressive Gunslinger where the title character temporarily gets out of fighting a duel because his opponent confirmed the time via a message instead of a note.
Huh? Spam callers rarely leave voicemail, but even when they do it’s trivial to just read it and delete. Why would I have 30 to go through? It’s one.
And, if you try to contact me or someone like me and get voicemail, you should perhaps consider that their experience is different from yours, and leave a voicemail.
If I call someone and discover that they haven’t answered the phone and don’t have voicemail, I don’t get pissed at them. I’m annoyed at the overall situation, not at any specific person likewise caught up in it.
If someone is trying to reach me and won’t leave voicemail because they think nobody ever uses voicemail, I’m probably never going to know about it; it’ll just be a missed call from an unknown number, and I’ll assume it was a spammer. If someone then proceeds to tell me that they refused to leave a voicemail because they think no one uses it, I’m going to think they’re ignorant of the fact that a lot of people do use it, and further that even if nobody they deal with uses it that would be a pretty silly reason not to leave me one. But I wouldn’t be assuming that lots of people they deal with do use it; I’d be thinking that they assume their particular previous experience is everyone’s.
I don’t doubt that it works for your life, but that call about my mother might be from the EMT’s phone, like @thorny_locust said. Or a hospital or the police. At various times when we were working, both my husband and I had to keep our phones on 24/7. Like I said, it doesn’t really bother me to wake up for a second and decide whether to answer based on the number - and it doesn’t annoy me unless it’s those damn Wordle scores
This is a fair point. Depending on the app or the phone, you might be able to silence messages/chats and still leave the phone’s volume on.
Here’s what drives me crazy. I love the handmade soaps, but they seem to melt. They do not last longer for me. A store-bought bar that I’d have in the shower, will be dry when I take my next shower. The homemade soaps don’t seem to do that. I have tried putting them out of the way of the shower spray and I’ve used different types of soap holders. It’s not long before they’re a mushy glob.
Yeah, I was in the same boat. 24/7 availability.
I’ll never forget the time my mom called at night, and I looked to my Wife and said “Pack me a bag”. Two hour mountain drive one way. I was out of the house in 10 minutes. Summer, Fall, or Winter.
That happened a couple of times actually. It was kinda rough.