David Pogue has a pretty humorous piece in the New York Times about an annoying voice prompt that follows the personal voice mail greeting of Verizon Wireless subscribers when they are not available to take a call. Its a good lifes little annoyances bit in the news this week, and actually touches on something that annoys me, too.
Pogue speculates that these automated dirges are an effort to increase revenue. Im not entirely sure I agree, though I really do wonder if any users are so unfamiliar with the concept of leaving a message after a beep following nearly thirty years of mass market personal call answering systems to need these prompts. These automated messages are relatively new additions to mobile voice mail systems, and perhaps reflect the interface complexity added by enabling the callback number option. I actually dislike this callback option, because if somebody calls me my phone itself saves the number of the missed call. Unless that person was calling from an extension behind an office PBX the number usually shows up in the phone memory as the literal number from which the call was made. This functionality is standard in most modern phones and leaves the carrier-provided option for a callback a pointless redundancy. Get rid of that option and simplify the voicemail prompting.
Cingular is no better than Verizon Wireless. There is a prompt following the personal message about leaving a message or callback number, and its all annoying as hell. Sprint PCS makes callers wait through this In-A-Gotta-Da-Vita set of directions up front on their voice mail messaging, but thankfully you can just press 1 to get to the magic beep to leave your message.
One other minor thing that annoys me at a level disproportionate to its true inconvenience to me is voice mail system which require too many entries on the part of the mailbox user. My work voicemail system requires us to indicate we want to access new messages as a first step in the system and then indicate we want to listen to them in yet another prompt. Do I want to listen to them? No, I want to hold them between my knees. Of COURSE I want to listen to them! Our home voice mail system from Vonage is the same. Two prompts is way too much to get from log-in to your new messages, and one may be too many. To give props back to Cingular, when I log in to check voice messages from my mobile I go right to new messages, which begin to playback immediately. As they should.
Just discovered this post, thank you, finally someone has commented on the incredible annoyance of the “messages for dummies” recording that playes after you reach someone’s voice mail. I called Cingular today to see if I could get it disabled and the lady acted like she couldn’t possible believe that I was wasting her time with this