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David Pogue Wants to Take Back the Beep
David Pogue has distilled into useful form a long-standing complaint I have (and one reason I have long had a voice mail greeting that asked people not to leave me voicemail): cell phone companies set up the greeting, caller instructions, and playback system prompts in large part to maximize their revenue per user; by his calculations, the "mandatory 15-second voicmail instructions" from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and others is earning those companies something near a billion dollars a year in charges. Pogue suggests that users should "take back the beep," and to that end provides contact information for the largest cell carriers in order to register a complaint — and, more helpful in the short run, suggests ways in which to make better use of paid-for phone minutes by alerting callers how to bypass the annoying instructions.
He mentions the # in the article. That's not the point. The point is that millions upon millions of customers are not as smart as you are, so they listen through that voicemail message every single time they want to leave a message. That adds up to hundreds of thousands or millions of wasted man-hours each year, as well as additional charges to some customers.
And if you had read TFA, you'd have noticed that he mentioned the fact that he's talked to high-up execs at these companies and that they admitted to him that they do it for the purpose of collecting additional charges. So, while "conspiracy" may be a rather strong word, it's not altogether inaccurate.
Instructions that I posted here:
http://community.sprint.com/baw/thread/20563
1. Call Your Voicemail
2. At the menu, press 3 for Personal Options
3. Press 2 for Greeting
4. Press 1 to change the greeting.
5. To enable/disable the instructions, press 3
Oh, and as long as you're in Personal Options, listen for the "Expert Mode" option and enable that. Should shave a few seconds of your voicemail checking.
It's a double edged sword. Yes, there are some great EU market regulations (like standardized cellphone chargers), but there are some pretty terrible regulations, too. Many of the EU market regulations are extremely expensive to comply with. You would not be happy, I assure you, if prices at Fry's and Microcenter were as high as prices are at retail stores in France.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I hadn't even realized it until I was bored one time when I was checking my voicemail. I went through the other options to see what was available and one of them was to turn off these pre-recorded caller instructions that he's complaining about.
Maybe people just need to check what options their voicemail provides them instead of jumping to drastic measures like this? Wait... I forgot who I'm talking to here...
An interesting, relatively unknown fact that I picked up while working on telephony systems a while back: carriers get paid (by other carriers) for incoming calls.
Not only do you pay more to your carrier to listen to the inane voicemail prompt (since you might use more minutes), but your carrier also pays more to your friend's carrier. For example, if I'm an AT&T customer and I call a Verizon customer to leave a voicemail, AT&T has to pay Verizon for every second that I'm on the phone. This (perverse) incentive makes more sense than charging people for more minutes, since often the company charging for minutes (AT&T in this case) is not the company that controls the recorded message (Verizon).
--Bruce
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
While we're turning in geek cards...
Yes, # skips the greeting when calling AT&T subscribers and, apparently, T-Mobile subscribers. If you call a Verizon customer and press #, you get the login prompt, and (AFAICT) no way to actually leave your friend a message without calling back.
So, just as TFA says: You can skip everyone's greeting, but you have to memorize which carrier they use.
C'mon, hand it over.
I'm on Bell Mobility in Canada (until July 2009 when I can change without penalty) and not only do we have the listed voice mail annoyances, we also pay $6 each a month for caller id and voicemail. Also there is no trick that a caller can use to skip the greeting. If you record your own, it appends "At the tone, leave your message" anyways.
Did I mention we have to pay about $20 more a month on average (even after currency conversion)?