David Pogue posted a public rant about the annoyingly long “voicemail instructions” messages on nearly all carriers now; not the personal ones people record, but the ones you have to wait through to even get that.
My time is worth money and yours is too. Please call your own phone from work or a friend’s phone; let it ring and go to voicemail. See for yourself what people calling you are hearing…
If you don’t like it; please do something about it. Find out from your carrier what options need to be saved to eliminate the unnecessary and time consuming (and call minute burning) instructions. If your carrier is uncooperative (T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T: I am looking at you), then subscribe to YouMail or Google Voice (both are free, both are excellent voice mail services for older phones without visual voicemail of their own, both help intercept and block unwanted calls, both allow you to set custom greetings for calls from your friends).
Huge thank you to Robert for the Google Voice invite. I have now used both Google Voice and YouMail; and love them both. They are somewhat unnecessary on a modern smart phone like the iPhone; but on older phones they are very useful services.
If you are confronted with one of these annoyingly long outgoing messages instructing you on how to do what you’ve already known how to do since 1982, you can sometimes bypass the instructions if you already know the service carrier of the person you are calling:
- AT&T: * or #
- Sprint: 1
- T-Mobile: #
- Verizon: 1 or *
Sources:
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/the-mandatory-15-second-voicemail-instructions/
http://lifehacker.com/5226278/hack-your-voicemail-to-save-time
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