Using Humor

Posted: 05 Nov 2009 06:55 AM PST

Cover of 'American Gigolo'

If you immediately thought of the Giogio Moroder song popularized by Blondie on the soundtrack to American Gigolo… that was 29 years ago! You need to get out more.

I want to talk about voicemail.

And how bad messages drive me crazy.

The scenario goes like this:

Phone rings. I can’t answer in time, but I see on the Caller ID who called. I wonder… What did they want? and about that time the voicemail message comes through, “Ah ha!” I think, I can now find out what they want. So I push the playback button and hear that I have one new message, that if I want to playback the messages I need to push the same buttons I have been pushing for years. I hear that the message came in at some o’clock on some date and finally I get to the message… “Dan this is (blank) Call me.”

Call you? Call you what? About what? How about a little detail?

Sometimes the caller will even tell you what time it is when they called, although this seems more to cover their butt than for any useful purpose, since their stated time is never even close to the time the message actually came in.

How hard is it to say “it’s about the fifty bucks,” or, “can we meet tomorrow at 9:00 am my office?” or, “I vote NO on the proposal.” or, “I saw your wife with Jimmy at the bar last night,” something, anything, other than “call me.” I even used to ask people to leave a detailed message, so they would say, “Call me, at home, after 5:00.” Not to mention how stupid you feel when you call and get their voicemail and your message has to be, “You said to call, so…” So what? What can we say?

And how long have answering machines and voicemail been around? Is there anyone on the planet that has trouble with this? But still, just about every cell carrier tacks instructions for how to leave a voicemail onto your greeting.

Recently David Pogue in the New York Times estimated: “I'm using, as an example, Verizon's $60-a-month plan. You get 900 minutes for that, which comes out to 6.67 cents a minute.Verizon has 70 million customers. If each one leaves a message or checks voicemail twice a day, that's 70 million * 6.67 cents * .5 (half a minute listening to two 15-second instruction recordings) * 365 days = $852,092,500. And that's just Verizon!”

To be fair, ATT recently eliminated the phrase “To page this person please press 5 now.” If you have ever “paged this person” Let me know in comments.

I have to admit I tried it once.

The automatic paging text went out, with my phone number, (to the phone of the person who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer my call to begin with.)

I think the message said “Call me.”