Please don’t leave a message after the tone

So after reading a rant from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame, I’m glad to know I’m not alone. In fact, not only does he express my opinions on the matter, but he quotes someone else who does (and I suspect I know who the mystery quotee is as well).

Unlike Mystery VC and Michael, however, I don’t get nearly as much communication. Let’s face it, I’m not that busy and not that interesting, and yet I still get enough junk to frustrate me.

My current voicemail greeting goes like this:

Hi, you’ve reached Dan. I can’t answer the phone right now, so leave me a message and I’ll call you back.

This is, at best, disingenuous, and at worst, an outright lie. It says what voicemail greetings are supposed to say, without any pretence of honesty or practicality. The fact of the matter is, I hate phones. I hate talking on phones, I hate answering phones, I hate remembering phone numbers or writing them down, I hate punching them into the keypad (not least of all because it generally takes me five to seven tries to get the number right, more if it’s international). I hate that it’s analog, but I hate even more that it’s a digital system pretending to be an analog system.

Imagine if e-mail only came once a day, usually some time in the morning, and that it took two to ten days to arrive. Imagine that people had to pay extra to send attachments, and that if you weren’t around when the postman came, you’d have to go to your ISP’s office to download them. Imagine if you typed ‘.com’ as ‘.cmo’ and you didn’t realize until it was returned to you after spending three weeks in a sorting station in Azerbaijan. Imagine if whenever someone sent you something from outside the country, UPS charged you $40 in taxes and handling, and $50 in customs brokerage, even though they didn’t actually DO anything, the bastards.

My point is, what we actually have is a completely telephone digital system kneecapped by pretending to be a completely analog system that sucked.

Michael makes the (accurate) point that text is faster to read than voice is to listen to, and even if you’re a lunatic motormouth, it’s far, far more effective because if you’re too slow I get bored and delete your message halfway through, but if you’re too fast I miss half your message anyway and delete it regardless.

If you call me and I recognize the number, if and you’re not a friend of mine or my mother (or your mother, har har) then I’ll ignore you, and you’ll leave me a voicemail which I’ll also ignore. If I don’t recognize the number, I’ll answer out of curiosity, but I’ll probably be phenomenally uninterested in whatever you’re saying (assuming I can even hear you, i.e. I’m not on the bus, on the street, at Starbucks, or any other place I spend 99% of my time) and tune you out. Remember, I have an iPhone, which means I can turn your volume down and play Dots or Aurora Feint while pretending to listen to whatever you have to say.

If you send me an e-mail, on the other hand, I’ll generally read it immediately and reply right away, unless it’s staggeringly boring or I need to attach a file to it, in which case I’ll do it when I get to my apartment/office. Oftentimes, I’ll send a quick message with whatever information I have at the moment, then follow it up with more detail later. Remember, I have an iPhone, so I can do this from the bus, Starbucks, the Skytrain, the office, meetings, Stanley Park, taxis, the airport, or anywhere else where electromagnetic radiation is plentiful.

A special kind of hell is reserved for any voicemail that references any e-mails you’ve sent or intend to send, because hey, here’s a thought, send me the e-mail. It’s not going to take weeks, I won’t have to be home to get it, and Homeland Security won’t get on my case if you talk about how your party was ‘the bomb’.

I suppose in the end, I have no real grounds for complaint. I am, after all, asking people to leave a message, and asserting I will get back to them. Perhaps my message should read something like this:

Hi, you’ve reached Dan’s phone. Please feel free to send me an SMS or e-mail. You may also contact me on Twitter, or Facebook if you’re desperate. You may even google my name for a dozen other methods of contacting me. Whatever you choose though, please don’t leave a message after the tone.