I think it’s culture arising out of the limitation of technology. Back when voicemail was the only thing, people got used to it, and it became culturally ingrained in the US. Here in Singapore, nobody uses voicemail. Nobody. I technically have it on my service, but I wouldn’t know how to access it even if I did use it, and nobody ever leaves voicemails. It’s all about texting. If I’m at work, people send me an email if they can’t get me on my phone, or they call my mobile, or they text my mobile.
Even back when there were only pagers, we used alphanumeric pagers, and us kids got pretty adept at typing out entire messages using the T9 keypad on public phones. Even now, my fingers still have the muscle memory to type out my name on T9. I’d wager that’s the case in all societies that didn’t develop with voicemail.
Heck, it might even be a US particular thing. I don’t recall voicemail being all that hot in the UK where I lived for a while.
I come from a culture which when it comes to voicemail is the opposite of the US. By the time we got voicemail, we’d had the ability to see missed calls for a couple of years; people had even developed codes based on missing calls on purpose*. So we never got used to that thing. My inbox is full by now, I assume… I have no idea how to access that thing, but for some reason most providers don’t offer the option of just shutting the damn thing off.
People with normal phone numbers know I’ll call back when I can; people who need to contact me for business reasons and who call from Skype or from an extension have my email or can SMS me.
Ex: “call and let it ring twice, we’re meeting at the post office. Let it ring five times, we’re meeting at the train station.” Or “I’ll drop a call when we’re leaving the house.” (where “dropping the call” = hanging up after the first ring).
I’m one of those that won’t return a call without a VM or text, unless it someone on my contact list.
Also, I reject any call that shows “blocked” or “unknown” on my caller ID, so without a message of some kind, I’m just going to assume you’re a telemarketer.
This seems odd to me. Did people in your countries not have answering machines on their landlines before wireless phones became common? Did wireless phones not become common until texting was standard? Because in the USA, the chronological progression went:
Landline with answering machine -> wireless phone with voicemail -> texting
So when everyone started getting wireless phones, the voicemail was immediately analagous to their home answering machine, and there was no other way to send them a message.
This is another annoying thing about my friend’s phone. His brother used to work for Verizon Wireless corporate, and he’s the one who initially set him up with service. He must have been some kind of privacy nut or something, because he had it set up so that my friend’s number was blocked from caller ID by default. So my friend’s calls always show up as “Restricted,” which means I never know it’s him calling (I have other people who call me for business purposes as “Restricted” as well.) He can enter a prefix when dialing to unblock the number on that particular call, but if he saves that prefix as part of a stored contact’s phone number, texting to that person then doesn’t work. What’s annoying about it is that for a long time he seemed to either not care about this or secretly like for it some unknown reason: as with the issue with the OP, I asked him “why don’t you call Verizon and get them to unblock your number” and he basically hemmed and hawed and didn’t answer the question. Though he did tell me just a month or 2 ago that he finally did try to do so, and they told him “I don’t see any block feature on your account, sorry, can’t help you.” So his brother must have done something way behind the scenes that’s now impossible to figure out.
I like voice mail. I don’t always have my phone next to me and I don’t expect the caller to keep calling trying to reach me. I also reason that if it’s important then the caller will leave a message.
Back when minutes were expensive, if you got voicemail, even for a second, it could be as much as a dollar but missed calls were not charged for so you could send free information by using the number of rings as the message.
I never heard of anyone doing this in the USA. I got my first cell phone in September 2000, and I think my plan had 250 daytime minutes per month. Yeah, I suppose checking your voicemail used up a couple of those minutes, but I don’t remember anyone ever complaining about this.
I have allowed my voicemailbox fill up and allowed it to stay that way for months, not listening to the voicemails. I didn’t delete them because I hadn’t listened to them yet, but I always intended to listen to them and just didn’t. There are some things I just plain don’t want to hear. I know it might be important that I hear them, but I’d rather enjoy a few more minutes of not knowing some sort of horrible news.
Then there are the ones I’ve listened to that dictate some sort of unpleasant task I should be doing. I couldn’t delete them because they were the reminder to do the task, but I’d avoid the tasks because they were so unpleasant.
Obviously I couldn’t really enjoy even the moments of ignorance, as I’d still have the dread of the potentially bad news lurking in my voicemailbox, so I’m not saying it was an effective strategy or really even a strategy at all, but it’s an explanation.
The US went for a model where customers signed long term contracts with packages of minutes and the phone was included. Most of the rest of the world went with pay as you go plans where people bought their phones outright. Also unique to America is that both sides of the phone conversation paid for the call. In every other country I’ve been to, only the caller pays.
I think my first plan was something like 30 cents a text message and 50 cents a minute, but you bought your minutes in chunks of $20 and $20 would last me a few months because I dialed out sparingly (it was mostly for my parents to call me with. If I wanted to call them, I would call, let it ring for 3 rings, then hang up and they would call me back).
I’ve never seen an answering machine, except in the movies. As far as I remember, it went pagers and then mobiles, I’ve literally never left a message on an answering machine.
Just so there’s some reference, I grew up in the 80s.
Or it’s actually very important, they call back get VM again, lather rinse repeat, and eventually have to stop trying.
I work for an health insurance company and have to place outbound calls to members (& less often providers) for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes very important reasons (like there was a problem with an application and we can’t process into we verify something with the applicant, or we start getting returned mail back). We are allowed to leave voicemails, but due to HIPAA we can’t even say the members name or why were calling (only where were calling from, our #, and a reference number). We are also only allowed to make 3 calls (at certain intervals) before giving up (usually a letter is sent out too, not that it helps when were calling to advise of returned mail :smack:).
Not responding can have very negative effects for subscribers. Like missing out important information about their plan, having outdated demographic information, being assessed penalties, being disenrolled, or even not allowed to enrol to begin with. Nothing beats have a senior citizen call in the first time they tried to use there insurance and having to tell them there was problem with the application, we tried contacted them by mail & phone, but because they didn’t call us back in time they don’t have insurance (& can’t just reapply without a valid election period, which might not happen again for up to a year). I actually had to do that this morning.
Hmm. I’m 39. If someone calls and doesn’t leave a voicemail or text, I don’t call back. I assume it’s not important. I like voicemail, because plenty of people who call me are not calling me from cell phones. My parents, for instance, don’t even own a cell phone. Plenty of people call me from work land lines, where the voicemail is useful. And if you’re leaving a long, complicated message, it’s often easier to leave it on the voicemail than texting it all out. (Plus I still call plenty of land lines, so it’s not an option to text in those instances, anyway.) I’m surprised people find it so anachronistic. Looking at my cell phone, I have four voicemails left on it from yesterday and today. I’ve had two people text me in that same period of time.
And in Spain, it went landline -> landline that gives you a list of numbers from which you missed calls -> cellphones. We didn’t even have pagers: the only people who ever had pagers were doctors, it was only a few of them and, since those pagers always went to the people on duty, they were the property of the hospital.
The closest thing 99.9999…% of the country ever came to having an answering machine was someone else taking the call and writing a note. My American coworkers found it extremely strange that we’d take our coworker’s calls, we found it very strange that they would not even when said coworker had an equivalent position.
I’m 27. I don’t have a landline, so I get all calls, business or personal, on my cell phone. So of course I listen to my voicemails and return the call if necessary, which 80% of the time it is or the person wouldn’t have bothered to leave a message. The vet is not going to text me from their landline to confirm my cat’s appointment. The mechanic is not going to text or play phone tag to tell me the car isn’t ready to be picked up. I can totally believe that some people get stupid voicemails from friends like “What time does NCIS come on TV?” but it’s not my experience. I don’t return missed calls if there isn’t a message to that effect–if you leave a message asking me to call you back, I will do so as promptly as possible, but if you don’t, I’m going to assume either it wasn’t important or you’ll call again.
