Slashdot Mirror
So Long Voicemail, Give My Regards To the Fax Machine
itwbennett writes: Yes, it was just a matter of time before voicemail, the old office relic, the technology The Guardian's Chitra Ramaswamy called "as pointless as a pigeon with a pager," finally followed the fax machine into obscurity. Last week JPMorgan Chase announced it was turning off voicemail service for tens of thousands of workers (a move that CocaCola made last December). And if Bloomberg's Ramy Inocencio has the numbers right, the cost savings are significant: JPMorgan, for example, will save $3.2 million by cutting voicemail for about 136,000. As great as this sounds, David Lazarus, writing in the LA Times, warns that customer service will suffer.
I turned off voicemail at my company 5 years ago, saving thousands per year, which i was able to move to the employee incentive program.
Nobody misses it at all.
Makes perfect sense to me. I talk to people on the phone all the time, but it seems rude to just call someone without first sending an instant message or text to ask if they're free. My usual response when someone IMs me asking if I'm free is to give them an estimate (usually 5-15 minutes) of how long I need to complete what I'm working on so that I'm free to talk. A phone ringing unexpectedly is an annoying interruption and listening to a voice mail is a nuisance.
Well, one could use a combination of e-faxes & printers. But I agree w/ you - I can only see faxes becoming irrelevant once the Legal profession embraces electronic signatures.
The US mortgage industry single-handedly is keeping facsimile alive and well. Anyone who's bought a house lately can attest that they have no clue about PII in unencrypted e-mails, and think nothing of asking you to print out, sign and initial a 60 page document, then fax it back to them. And then they have the gall to complain when you reduce their 8.5 x 14 legal size documents to 8.5 x 11 because your $99 inkjet printer/scanner can't handle legal size.
/s
With throwback companies like that, you'd never know that the mortgage industry is the major backer behind DocuSign. Another reason why banks should issue you a digital certificate when you open an account. If the US Government can implement PKI for their own use, surely the more nimble private marketplace can do the same...
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
Except that most of the time when I leave a voicemail message, the information I am leaving is enough to give the person on the other end a starting point on the reason I called them and an idea about how urgent it is for them to get back to me. Generally, I am calling in the first place because the topic of conversation is one that requires a lot of back and forth that takes entirely too long to resolve when done in typed messages. If the reason for the call is urgent I will usually follow up with an email, IM, and text message (the last two depending on their availability with the person I am trying to reach).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
An interesting side note to this. A buddy of mine in venture capital use a fax machines all of the time to send documents back and forth because email and any "store communications" they are required to keep copies of for regulators and other review. Since the fax machines don't "store" information, at least not long term enough to count, they are not required to keep copies of info sent or received over fax.
Language bias disrupts actual communication.
So we just make shit up and demand everyone understand it.
Pointing out, or ripping on, language constructs that are not to your liking doesn't make you intelligent; it makes you a disruptive asshole.
Oh. Wow. Go back and re-read that until you understand the unintended consequence of your statment.
If you cannot get over the use or R U 31337 you need to know you are the problem, and not the writer. The intelligent people, or at least honest people, who want to engage in actual communication have more adaptive protocols and are more concerned with the content than the wrapper.
The use of various odd symbols or semi cryptic groups of letters such as AFAIAC as a communication language is not necessarily that difficult. But it has a few strikes going against it.
First, It doesn't enhance communication, it impedes it. A large part of the alternate spellings universe is based on trendiness, where one tries to place themselves with using a "new" version of the word they want to type. Fast evolving, yes, but never can make it into the lexicon, because that would be the ultimate disgrace for the trendsetters. The goal is to be different, not to conform to any standard.
Second, it is jarringly imprecise. Anything other than top level communications doesn't work. I had a new employees who tried to refuse to take telephone calls, saying he only responded to text - and he was so 1337. So after taking a log time and many texts to try to communicate, I eventually told him he had a choice. Pick up the telephone when I called him, or I would walk across the building and we would talk in person, with the understanding that I wasn't going to be happy at all about having to give him special treatment. He weighed th eoptions, and like any good millenial, he didn't like interfacing with people too much, so he took the phone calls from me.
Third - it ain't rocket science Spunky! I can easily understand or figure out what they are saying, even as words are mutated to keep up with trends. And as need be, I can write just like them - although I might be a mutation or two behind. But the converse is not necessarily true, and communication is very limited.
Know your audience, and communicate with them in the form they understand. And I'm gleefully thinking about some 1337 versions of mathematical formulae. Now there would be some precise communications.
TLDR: Grammar Nazi's please fuck off.
Says the guy who's demanding that everyone must accept the alternative universe of communications via rapidly mutating misspellings based upon the real words.
Tell me "Trend Nazi", after enough mutations, what will you do when the spelling returns to the original version? (4 b?@ What did I just write? I and translate, but you really should know and accept what I wrote, because it communicates, right?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I have to question those numbers. Perhaps if you're in the stone age paying for a voicemail per-seat license per year or something like that, sure. But you're still doing it wrong. Voicemail is pretty damn cheap to run and doesn't cost much in storage space either (look at those AMR sound files that some cellphone providers save their voicemails in that your Android phone then downloads).