Likewise. I work in an immigration law practice in a firm of ~ 70 people. If I leave a message for a client, the main office number is what shows up on the missed calls log. If the client doesn’t listen to the voice mail, they will have no way of knowing whether I called, or the partner I am working for called, or the billing office called, etc. If they call back the main office number, they may not even speak the same language as the receptionist. It makes me batty. Especially when I am calling in a brief window between other appointments with specific information that may be useful to the client and that I may not have memorized (a case number, a phone number, a hearing date/time, etc.) It’s a huge waste of time, and the client is paying on an hourly basis for my time, so they are just costing themselves money.
Every smart phone I’ve had (all two of them) had a voicemail app that would show you your messages with the phone number and length of message. You could listen and delete the messages without ever actually calling your voicemail. They also had a speech-to-text function, but that required a paid subscription.
Most of the time that message doesn’t mean it is really full. It almost always means the VM was never configured or is disabled.
I’m betting that like me, you’re dealing with lots of low socioeconomic status people who don’t seem to have the foresight to do things like set up their voicemail. A lot of people I call for work don’t answer their phone and don’t have voicemail set up.
I doubt it. I can’t recall calling anyone other than my friend mentioned in the OP and getting the “the mailbox is full” recording, and I know he has voicemail. I frequently call people for work and get a recording that explicitly states “this customer has not set up their voicemail.”
Sometimes, yes. And besides low socioeconomic status, the most frequent culprits are people who don’t speak English, who speak Spanish as a second language (they are Mayans), usually not fluently, and may have a year or two of formal education at most. When I eventually manage to talk to them and explain why I need to be able to reach them reliably (they don’t always return phone calls either, or they return calls and leave messages without mentioning who’s calling), they seem to understand why having voice mail set up would be useful, and promise that they will go back to the phone store to get help setting it up if they can’t figure it out themselves. But then either they never do, or they set it up once and deactivate it or…I don’t know what, and then I end up having to send them letters anyway because I can’t reach them by phone.
Sigh. Sometimes I get lucky and they have a spouse or child who knows how to use voice mail.
100? Really? Wow. I feel like such an alien sometimes.
I’m 32. I don’t leave voicemails with simple questions like “the name of that show”, but I suppose I have always assumed it’s just like an answering machine. It’s never really occurred to me that it might be something else.
It would never occur to me to disregard a voicemail. What am I missing here?
I don’t like texts, in that I can’t type them while walking (and I hate when others do this; I want to scream some non-sequitur to make them jump), and I sit and ponder my word choices, and so on.
One consideration: You can’t send a text while driving, but you can leave a voicemail, if you are in handsfree mode.
Who’s living in the past?
My iPhone gives me a list of voicemails, who left them, and when. I can then listen to them in any order, skip through them, save or delete with a swipe of my finger.
My Ooma box at home even emails me when I get a voicemail, and I can listen to it on any of my computers or iDevices.
Personally, I think that texting sucks. I always run across people who would rather have a two-hour texting marathon for something that would take 30 seconds on the phone. Gahh!
You can send text messages hands free now. Cortana will do it. I think Siri will do it and I’d be sort of surprised if there isn’t a way to do it on Android too.
I meant in the sense of the old tape-style answering machine, where it was the only way to even identify if someone had called at all. Now we have the caller ID, text messages, etc… so we know someone called, and can call them back without a message to instruct us to do that, which isn’t something you could do in the answering-machine era. You literally had to say “Hey… it’s Bump and it’s 2 o’clock… call me back.”, and in my experience, a lot of older folks still think that way.
But to the OP - it’s because voice mail sucks. It’s a pain in the ass to listen to voice mail messages; it sometimes costs money to get them, but in some contexts, they can’t be turned off. On a previous mobile contract, I recorded a voicemail greeting saying “Please don’t leave a voice message, because I won’t pay to listen to it”.
If it’s really important that someone gets hold of me, that’s their problem until they succeed.
ETA: Mangetout’s post wasn’t there when I started. Not trying to pile on.
The real question for the OPs friend is why, if he doesn’t like voicemail, he doesn’t call his carrier and turn it off.
Leaving it full is misleading his callers into thinking that maybe there is an opportunity to leave a message that will be heard and acted on, but just not right now.
If his personal policy is to not use voicemail, then by golly, he ought to quit head-faking his correspondents & friends with almost-voicemail.
Or else maybe he’s just a lazy jerk.
If you’re talking about voice to text, then yes, you can do that on Android.
Sort of voice-to-text, but with Cortana and (I believe) Siri, you don’t just dictate the text - you instruct the machine “send a text to my wife to say I will be 10 minutes late” and it does the whole job. Does Android have that too now?
Several other people made this point too, and I forgot to address it earlier. I don’t like calling back a missed-call number from someone who evidently neither left a voicemail nor sent a text, and I don’t do it. The reason is that I don’t like it when people do it to me. Sometimes I pocket-dial someone, or my phone is lagging and misinterprets my swipe to do something else as a swipe to call someone. I hang up as soon as I see my phone is accidentally dialing, but I hate it when the person then calls me and says “you just called?” and I have to say “sorry, it was an accident.” If I want you call me, I’ll leave a voicemail or send a text.
Also, as several of us have pointed out, if it’s a business-related call from an institution with an internal phone system, the correct phone number to call back might not show up. Dialing out on some of my department’s phones causes “999-9999” to display in the caller ID.
I agree. I don’t really like checking my voicemail, and I’ll allow it’s a bit of a chore. But to me, an unheard voicemail message is like an unread text or an unopened envelope of snail mail which you can’t tell what it is. I guess this is the central issue I’m raising in the OP: I would never, say, go to bed knowing I had unread texts or unopened personal envelopes that arrived in the mail that day. I don’t know what’s in them. It could be something important and I just feel compelled to find out. Same thing with voicemail. So why are some people content to completely disregard it?
My friend has an iPhone, which I guess raises the question of why he doesn’t do this.
This isn’t quite what the OP is talking about (or I don’t think it is) but we–no, let’s be honest, I–fired a guy this year for not listening to (and replying) his work voice mails. That wasn’t his only offense, but it was the one that put him over the edge.
Several of us have made a distinction between work/business and personal communication, which is often more time-sensitive.
Not that I’m advocating ignoring personal communications mind you.
You guys must be luckier than I with respect to Siri. It only understands half to two/thirds of what I tell it.
Interesting, of course, I don’t have (and don’t want) a phone like that. I have a semi-smart phone, because I’m too addicted to the internet as it is.