The information age has offered us so many different forms of communication that our greatest challenge is figure out how to best take advantage of them.
So why in the world do we still have voicemail?
1) I hate listening to voicemail. I hate trying to make a decent sounding recording of my name using a tool designed for live communication. I hate navigating endless automated phone prompts. I hate replaying a message while I look for something to write a phone number down on. I hate having to linearly trudge through all my messages in order to hear the one that I want. I hate that the act of listening to voicemail ties up my phone and sends other incoming calls directly there.
2) I hate leaving voicemail. I hate listening to the patronizing, endlessly patient, automatic instructional voice carefully explain to me how to leave a message, as thought I’d never done it before, every single time. I hate the lack of standardized menu trees. I hate being blindsided with a non-postponeable recording when I was prepared to have an interactive conversation with someone. I hate the unnatural act of trying to have a conversation with someone who isn’t there.
In the time it would take me to construct and recored a voicemail message, constrained to 30 seconds, I could have put all the same information, and more, into an email, providing both me and the receiving party with sortable, indexable, archivable, replyable copies of the coorespondenance, that communications more information, take me less effort to create, and them less effort to absorb. If you don’t like email, IM, Twitter, Facebook, of FriendFeed it to me. If you want to, write me a letter on paper, put a stamp on it, and send it in the mail….I don’t mind.
Or…here’s a revolutionary concept…
Just call me back later.
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