My thoughts exactly!

Finally someone has written what I’ve been feeling about voice mail for a very long time!

It’s a waste of your time and my time!

I haven’t gotten around to it but I need to change my outgoing VM message to remind my callers that if they need a quick response or need to deliver a piece of information to me, my Blackberry certainly deals with good old fashioned emails/sms messaging just fine.

Consider the fact that Apple went to the trouble of patenting their Visual Voice Mail on the iPhone for that very reason – VM is an archaic pain in the ass. I have to dial, listen to some dumb greeting, perhaps enter a password, listen to some more instructions, memorize a few digits that control each of the different VM systems I use and deal with message in a linear fashion. I’m no iPhone fan, but their Visual VM is plain genius!

The folks at LifeHacker have a great posting on this today:

“It will come as news to most people over 30 that most people under 30 do not leave voicemail messages. Think about it: Voicemail takes a long time to retrieve and it’s almost never earth-shattering, so it’s not worth the time it requires. Microsoft is such a big believer in this that all voicemails you leave at the company go straight to email. And you can do the same if you use eVoice. Young people treat their list of missed calls as a page system. And they call the person back. No extra step for listening to the message.”