Depending upon your plan, it costs money to receive or send texts while calls are free. Texts could not be turned off, causing me to have to pay for unwanted spam texts.
If I’m calling you & it goes to v-mail, I find it easier to wait a few seconds & leave a message rather than hang up & open a texting app & type out what I was going to say; especially if I’m in the car, which has bluetooth (for calls only).
I don’t like voicemail, or answering machines. At work, I left a message that said “send me an email” and let it fill up - mostly with two things - vendor salespeople calling for things I didn’t want to buy, and outage messages I knew about because being in the loop was my job.
Voicemail is the lowest priority form of communication in my life. The first is face to face communication, the second is making contact on the phone, the third is email, forth text - and the fifth is voicemail. Because everything else is fairly push (its hard to ignore email and texts, you do have to check them, but in a very passive way) and I run out of time every day at work (and most of my voice mail is low value), I’m probably not going to get to pull my voicemail.
The other problem I have with voicemail is people assume they’ve reached you and that you’ll follow through. Strangely, far more than with email where they ask you to do something and if its important, follow up if they don’t get a response. I got sick of “well, I left you a voicemail, why didn’t you do it?” Um, because your voice mail was three minutes of garbled nonsense while you were in a noisy place, and from what I could make out of it, you were asking me to do something right now, that was against policy, and I’d already left for the day?
I despise voicemail. 90% of the voicemails I get on my cell phone are from recruiters from all commission sales jobs that I don’t want, telemarketers, political calls, or charity pitches. It’s a holdover from the days where cell phone companies want you to use more minutes so they have that, “You have one new message received Friday, January 1 at 2:04 pm” While I do listen to the first seconds or so, they do tend to build up in my mailbox until I do mass delete of voice mails.
Thankfully, I don’t have to deal with them at work too much. I do check work voicemails, although many of them are from vendors who seems to think I have something to do with purchasing or else people selling stock trading systems. There’s a bright red light on the phone which shows you have a voice mail and we used to have a office Nazi who would run to your manager if you left the light on too longer. Thankfully she got remoted out to another position and i don’t have to deal with her any longer.
I probably makes 100 calls for every text I write (which typically consists of “Yes” “No”, “OK” when I write one).
Why people write texts when it’s so much easier to just call and explain directly what you want totally escapes me.
No concern for signal quality changing over the course of the communication.
Recipient can handle the communication at their leisure.
Control over communications beginning and ending.
Easier to multitask.
For me specifically: Easier with hearing loss and poor audio quality.
Same here, especially the last. My hearing isn’t so great, and there are some people who I find difficult to understand over the phone.
Also I work in many different locations and often have a poor signal - I can get and receive texts, but not make phone calls.
Also I can send an image in a text, often a handy feature.
That said I definitely make and take more phone calls than texts, but texts definitely have their place. I would hate not to have that capability.
On the topic of texting, I’m particularly fond of WhatsApp as a messaging app.
This morning I had one I listened to five times before I got the phone number. arrrrgh.
All this talk about other countries is very interesting, but it does little to explain the motivations of my friend, who, like me, was born and raised, and lives in, the USA, and is from the same generation–one which, in my experience, does tend to pay attention to voicemail–as I.
I find voicemail to be somewhat useful because I do some volunteer work with retirees and stay-at-home parents who don’t always understand that I’m not free to talk during the work day, and even if I were, I don’t have the information they’re looking for – I have very limited Internet access at work – and wouldn’t be much help until I got home. So I send them to voicemail, they leave a message, and I call back when I have what they need and when I have time to talk. Some of them were a little pissy at first because they’re used to people picking up when they call, but they’re over it.
Not here. Nobody pays to receive calls or texts - that’s pretty much a USA thing, I think (and I always found it very odd).
Yes, not being contactable for some portions of my life could turn out to be a problem. It’s a risk I’m OK with.
I’m guilty of this. My voice mailbox is always full cuz I never access it. I have a list of missed calls. I call back as I can.
I thought I’d update this thread because I once again asked my friend about why his voice mail box was always full. In the OP, I mentioned I had asked him before why he never deletes his voicemails, and he hemmed and hawed and didn’t answer the question. This time, I came at it from a different angle, asking “do you just never listen to your voicemail?”
It turns out he does not, as several people in the thread were speculating, intend not to use voicemail at all. Rather, he has a bunch of saved voicemail messages he doesn’t want to delete. These fall into two categories: 1) important info about accounts, licensures, etc. which he’s never gotten around to writing down so he can delete the voicemail, and 2) voicemails which have a sentimental value, namely, funny voicemail messages friends have left him in years past. Because he has a bunch of messages he doesn’t want to delete, going through the messages and deleting all the others is a major chore (because every time he does it he has to work around all the ones he wants to save.) Therefore he procastinates doing this indefinitely. He said “I know, I know, I really should go through my messages and clean a bunch out.”
I think the reason he’s hemmed and hawed when I’ve asked him about it before is that he realizes it might be seen as a little weird to save funny voicemails for years on end for sentimental reasons.
I have this exact issue with a past employer that I left for this type of behavior. :(
I keep trying to reach them recently, but it is near impossible to get someone on to actually answer the phone, and the mailbox is **ALWAYS **full:confused::smack:
I guess if they are too lazy to pick up the phone, then they are guaranteed to be too lazy to check their messages as well!! :mad:
Also on the off chance that someone can be bothered to answer a ringing phone, they almost religiously can’t help you, and want to take a number to have someone else call you back later. Which NEVER HAPPENS…
This is why I left this place because I would literally be standing right there at the front desk while they were comparing fingernails as the phone was ringing off the hook, and just say, “meh. let the machine get it.”
Alright, I get that, besides the fact that they are being paid to do almost nothing else but answer the phone when it rings, but if you intend to let the machine answer every call then you NEED to check messages occasionally. :rolleyes::rolleyes:
Must be nice to get paid for nothing!!:dubious:
He may not be bothered by the voicemail notification. His phone is probably set up so that it doesn’t even remind him of past messages. And since nobody can leave a new message, he doesn’t have to receive “New Voicemail” notifications.
Personally, I can’t stand voicemail. I do not bother to check my voicemail at all. If someone leaves a voicemail, I simply erase it using the Visual Voicemail app without even listening to it. I simply press one button to delete it. Hopefully, they left a text. If not, I might call them back to see what they want. Or maybe send a text. But voicemail is such a waste of time. Especially when so much of it is unsolicited sales calls. If its someone I know or care to talk to, they’ll most likely hang up and send a text. Voicemail is archaic.
If someone calls, the assumption is that they want to speak to you, and you should call them back. When he sees the missed call from you, he knows you want him to call you back. Why do you bother leaving a voicemail that explicitly asks him to call you back? That’s the accepted goal and intent of your phone call–to speak to him. He doesn’t need you to tell him that in the voicemail. He knows you want him to call you back about something.
Exactly. Rare is the voicemail that actually doesn’t require a call back immediately after listening to it. And if you have to call the person back anyway, why bother to hear the voicemail. It is especially annoying when the voicemail is simply, “Hey, it’s John Smith. Please call me back”. I know who you are. I see your number in my phone. I know you want me to speak to you, because you called me. I don’t need to hear your voicemail to determine you would like a call back.
After a while, those messages get very old. A person easily grows tired of hearing pointless voicemail messages.
I have to clear my voicemail. That notification icon drives me crazy. Once in a while my friend will send me screen caps. She has learned to either clear her notifications or crop them off because it is what I will notice first in any pic she sends my way.
The proportion are probably reversed in my case. If you text me, I’ll either call you or not respond at all depending on whether or not a communication seems warranted. Very occasionnally, I’ll aknowledge your message, so you’ll find some “yes” “no” “OK” “kisses”, “good night” on my messaging history. The only exception is one friend who sometimes sends ramblings and then don’t answer the phone :mad: , so forcing me to actually type a fucking message.
100 texts? That’s probably two years worth of texting for me.
This.
I’ve not set up my voicemail on my new phone and after 3 months, I probably will never do so. My previous Voicemail message said “send me a text if you can, leave a message if you can’t.” I either call people back or they text me. So far it’s working for me!