This drives me NUTS. If I call a wrong number, I don’t want to get a call back saying, “why did you call me?” If I’m trying to find out where the meeting is tonight, I’m going to call everyone who’s going until someone answers their phone. If the fourth guy I call tells me where it is, I don’t want to get calls from the other three saying, “yeah, you called?” If I don’t leave you a message, don’t call me back.
If you use your phone for business, then you are the one wasting time. I leave short, sweet, specific voice mails: “Hey Tr0psn4j, I need the contact information for company A and a report on what company B purchased in May last year. Please call or email it to me.”
If you call me back without listening to my message first, you won’t have any of that information ready, and you’ve wasted my time and yours.
It’s a personal cell phone. Most of my friends leave 5 minute versions of “call me back” while my family usually leaves the “OMG I haven’t talked to you in 2 minutes are you dead or dying? Anyway call me back because you’re in your mid twenties and can’t do anything for yourself.”
I can see your point for a business phone though. But wouldn’t a text message be more appropriate for those situations?
I can place five calls and leave detailed voice mail messages in the time it takes to send one text message. And who knows? I might get lucky and actually talk to someone
And besides, there are people I call for business that I don’t WANT to give my cellphone number to. I call them on the business phone so the name of the business shows on their caller ID instead of my name.
Depends on if you’re the customer. In the time it takes me to retrieve, listen to your vmail, and then actually respond I can clear 10 of these “What’s John’s contact information” requests out of my email in box. Just drag and drop the information so there’s no human error.
I pick up the phone and call when that’s the most effective way to deal with things. IMHO, most vmail is not the most efficient way.
For those who don’t like receiving voice mail and you have a personal cell phone, why do you even have voice mail setup? Or do you not have the option of disabling it?
Mrs. Rhymer and I never leave such messages. We do, however, leave long, rambling, filthy messages that would probably cause John Ashcroft to have us arrested if he were still in a position of authority.
I haven’t checked my voicemail in over a year. It’s tedious and completely pointless. If an old friend is in town or there is an emergency or something important I need to know, I will get a text, which takes about 1/100 of the time to read as it takes to listen to a voicemail.
Everybody who leaves personal voicemails is retarded. I’m serious, here. There has never been a voicemail in the history of voicemails (except perhaps in a professional setting) where the sender could JUST GET TO THE FUCKING POINT! Texting requires more effort on the sender’s part, but probably takes less time considering they’re more likely to be brief and clear, and they don’t have to wait for the seven rings or whatever it is before the mailbox activates.
I don’t particularly like talking on the phone to begin with, but I hate when I have to leave a voicemail even more because it’s like all of a sudden I have to give an impromptu monologue. It’s different talking to a friend and tell them what you need to tell them than it is all of a sudden having to coherently list all the information without sounding like an idiot. It’s like a whole new level of really stupid anxiety.
I mean it’s like the difference between sitting down with your friends and chatting about tapirs versus standing up in front of them telling them all about tapirs while they say nothing and just stare at you.
Plus text messaging is just easier and you can do it while someone is in class and know that they can pick it up after class and won’t get in trouble like they would if their phone rang.
Yeah I understand this. I won’t leave a message unless I’m ready to. This means sometimes I’ll hang up, mentally compose a message, then call back and leave it. If I call and don’t leave a message, I’ve either rung the wrong number, felt it wasn’t important enough to have you call back, or I’m sending a text instead.
Pardon the half-hijack, but I’m really curious. What does texting in Japan look like? Is it written in romaji or is there some kind of Kanji interpreter program running in the backround that takes in romaji (or hiragana) arguments and transforms them into Kanji like they have on regular computer word processors? Just curious.
As for the topic of the thread:
I just feel awkward on voice mail, I don’t hate it, but I always feel weird leaving or listening to it. I can’t explain WHY it’s just an aversion.
I also don’t leave messages unless I’m ready too. But I’ve had several jobs where I did almost all of my work by phone, so perhaps I’m more acculturated to doing so than most.
I don’t hate voicemail but what I do hate is the extraneously long system greeting when a call I’m placing goes to the recipient’s voice mail. By the point in time, we all know how voicemail works. Play me their greeting and let me leave a message. Do not give me that crappy “The caller you are attempting to reach is unavailable. Press 1 or stay on the line to leave a message” intro to getting to their personal greeting. Probably just a pet peeve on my part but I find it incredibly annoying.
There are slight differences from phone to phone, but in general you switch input from romaji to hiragana to katakana to numerals. When you write in hiragana, options for various kanji appear in a submenu. Mine’s not really like a word processing interface, where as you type the letter change into kanji, and most that I’ve seen don’t do this either, though I imagine it exists on some phones.
I would guess that most phones are like mine, in that they don’t have the greatest dictionaries in the world as part of their interfaces, so sometimes a kanji either won’t be in the phone at all, or you’ll have to get to it in a roundabout way. If you need to type chuuko, 中古 (which isn’t the best example because it’s common and would come up right away, but it’s all I can think of), you could type chuu (中) and then furui (古い) and then just delete the い.
I haven’t seen anything that does romaji to kanji (or to the kana, for that matter), you just switch the mode. I’m pretty lucky because I somehow happened to luck upon the only model of phone that I’ve ever seen that has T9 mode.
Also, when I say texting, I’m really talking about emailing. I had a crappy phone with no email when I left the states, so I can’t speak to specifics, but I imagine it’s more comparable to a blackberry. My phone has an email address.
I dislike leaving voicemails on cellphones. After it rings eight or nine times, I have to listen to a female version of HAL on 'luudes inform me of my eight gajillion options before five seconds of silence that make me think I missed the beep in my robo-induced stupor, only to be interrupted by the beep so I can leave my ten-second message (“hey, it’s Jason calling about [whatever I wanted to talk about]; call me back.”) Total elapsed time: About a minute and a half, if the person doesn’t call me back while I’m waiting for HALette to finish her spiel.
The one that drives me crazy is when I’m picking up my voicemail on Verizon. I hear the beginning of the message and say, “Oh, I already talked to him,” so I press 7 to delete the message. Nothing happens. You need to wait until the message has played all the way through before it lets you delete it.
It’s almost like they were charging by the minute or something.
Put me in the category of hating voicemails. I don’t have them set up for my cell, but do at work. Here’s the type of voicemails I usually get…
hithisisJaneDoeofsomeorganizationyou’veneverheardof,andI’mcallingtoaskifwecouldhaveanextensiononourreportingforfundingbecauseourfiscalmanagerwasouthavingababy,it’sherfirstandquitehonestly,it’sbeencrazyaroundherewithoutherandshe’stheonlyonewiththeaccesstothefiscalinformationwhichweneedtocompletethereporting…(five minutes later)…soifyoucouldreturnmycallat555-(too fast to understand).
Hate it, hate it, hate it. Voicemail should be your name and your number ONLY. Repeat both. Repeat them so slowly your great Aunt Ethyl who is 98, legally blind and in a wheelchair could find paper and pencil and write it down while listening to you provide the information in your voicemail.
