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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.
I would cancel office phones alltogether. All those proprieatry systems costing thousands of dollars
Fax machines are still widely used. They are hardly obscure.
...will be when they realize not everyone tht spelz lyk dis is a teenager.
On the upside, they could use that as a way to lay off people too lazy to spell "what", "are", "you" and other amazingly difficult words.
"Dear Mr. Smith,
GTFO, lol.
kthxbai,
Management" ... I'm stuck on 2007, aren't I?
All glory to Arstotzka!
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.
Great, so everybody would now have to BYOD?
Obviously, submitter doesn't work in healthcare or legal fields. As much as I'd like to see that antiquated technology finally die, it's not going anywhere anytime soon.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
How do you know whether a phone number that you are calling is actually a cellphone which can accept IMs? When I call someone, I usually ask them if it's a good time to talk before getting into the conversation. If they are in a meeting, I'd prefer it if they ignored the call and sent me to their voice mail, where I could have more time to tell them exactly what you would say in the IM. Your solution would only make sense the day land lines are extinct, or that every phone has IM capability - cellular or cordless.
There are tens of thousands of fax machines and fax systems still in use today because, despite all of our technological advances, the fax machine is still the most secure way of delivering medical and legal documents between locations in a compact time frame.
E-mail? Right out unless you're configured for encryption and getting all the companies you deal with to agree on, utilize, and understand how the encrypt/decrypt works is ... beyond Herculean in scope. In the medical field alone that would require suppliers, doctor's offices, HME/DME companies, hospitals, hospices, quick care/walk-in style facilities, pharmacies, and so on to all have a system that worked easily that everyone agreed on. Of course, that doesn't begin to take into account the MILLIONS of patients that just might want to communicate with you via e-mail.
The legal field is just as bad - judges, courts, lawyers, public defenders, police departments, fire departments, etc, and clients of course.
So, yeah, technology that has supposedly died usually is alive and well and the people who think it has died just work somewhere they don't have to deal with it.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
So, apparently voicemail is dying before I even figure out what it is. I got a feeling it was something intended to replace answering machines, but I never found out how it was different.
Great job at drawing retarded conclusions guys.
Turning off desktop phone voicemail BECAUSE EVERYONE USES A CELL PHONE and has their office number forwarded to that anyway does not mean people aren't using voicemail.
But hey, don't take the extra three seconds to ask why they were not using it or anything.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
hmmm a lot of people didn't get the memo. sounds kinda like the PC is dead....
hasn't happened yet and not for a very long time, unfortunately as I would love the 20 year old fax server i currently support to die and go away.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Recorded speech is slow, impossible to organize, and nearly unsearchable. If you're providing information to me verbally, you're wasting both my time and yours: just send me a copy of the data source you're reading from. If you're providing creative ideas, you should write those suckers down in an email or other document so they don't get forgotten or mis-attributed. If you're not calling to provide either information or creative ideas, you're not saying anything useful and I don't want to listen to your businessbabble.
I'm loving voicemail now, I get the voicemail automatically transcribed and texted to me. I never have to call voicemail, and reading a text is super quick compared to listening to voicemail. Even google voicemail does this.
There's nothing more that I hate than coming into my cube & seeing the red light on my phone, which means I have a voice mail message. You have to call, enter your pin, and go through a menu to select listen to new messages, and then type/write down their number. I'd rather have people send me an e-mail instead. One good thing about Comcast phone service when we had it at home was it would convert it to text and send it to you via e-mail. I'd rather have that than deal with a voice mail message.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The idea that voicemail is dead is asinine.
I only have your phone number, and you don't answer (yes, I'm over 25, I actually call people on the phone), now what?
Dumb fucking emo hipsters, the rest of the world doesn't live on Instagram.
-Styopa
Voicemail isn't really a problem. The problem is the traditional dial in interface for voicemail sucks sour frog ass. It's time consuming, irritating, badly designed and frankly from a bygone era. Dialing in to listen to a voicemail message is technology that we no longer need. Getting messages via voice is useful but the format and interface need to update to modern technology.
I've been using a pair of systems (Google voice and one at work) which transcribe the voicemail, send it to you in an email with a recording and you can manage the calls though your computer or cell phone. I pretty much never actually listen to the voicemail because what I really care about is who called and roughly the topic of their call. Occasionally I listen to the actual message because the transcriptions usually read like a Mad-Lib but I can usually figure out the gist of the message.
Fax machines on the other hand are just pointless. They need to go away. My company doesn't have one anymore and we don't miss it a bit.
Everyone does already, even at low-paying jobs where the employees don't have individual numbers.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Why would you prioritize an unknown caller over someone with whom you're already having a conversation?
Who says they are unknown? I have caller ID at work. If I'm talking with a co-worker and a customer calls the customer should take priority in most cases. I've done this hundreds of times and it is the proper behavior. It's not rude, it's prudent. Our collective jobs depend on being responsive to our customers and we don't let our egos interfere with that fact.
Just as interrupting a conversation is rude, call waiting should be banned (just as voicemail!) and emergency calls routed $SOMEWHERE that guarantees a live immediate response (or perhaps keep the sole instance of voicemail in organizations).
It's only rude if there isn't a clearly understood reason for interrupting the call. My company employs just a handful of people and if a customer calls we need to have someone answer the phone. There is almost nothing I could be doing that would justify me ignoring a call from one of our customers during working hours. Anything I have to say to my coworker can probably wait a few minutes and we all understand that.
Quick? Cheap? Legally required, yes, and that's the one and only reason why fax persists. Your customers hate you because when you send them a fax they have to go hunt up an office service company that will receive it for them for $1.50 a page. They take the document home, sign it, and then miss a second day of work to bring it back to the office service company to send back to you.
And after all that, what you have is not printed pages but pictures of printed pages. To integrating that into your office document files, you are pretty much relegated to printing it out and filing paper.
Turning off voicemail is dumb. How are you supposed to get ahold of somebody who isn't available at that instant? About half the people who call my company looking for a rent house don't answer the phone when you attempt to call them or their voicemail hasn't been set up, or it is full. What am I supposed to do, keep calling them until they answer? No thank you, I will just call somebody else who actually answers their phone or has voicemail and rent the house to them instead.
How do people get jobs if they don't have voicemail and don't answer their phones? My guess is they don't. The HR people aren't going to keep calling them. They will just go on to the next candidate.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Is that no one checks their voicemail. The problem with email, is that no one responds to their email. The problem with cell phones is that no one answers their cell phones. [/end bitter i hate to work dispatch rant]
The reason they don't tell you to scan and email it is that email is not considered a secure or verifiable method of communication.
The difference between fax's point-to-point nature and email's going over the public internet aside...
It's a lot easier to mistype an email address than misdial a fax machine (and actually get another fax machine). I get confidential real estate info in my email all the time. Usually headed with 'I know this said fax, but I'm emailing it instead!'
Yeah, and it's not for me. There's a real estate agent who has the same username at a different domain. So I wind up with all these legal forms from morons who not only decided to email what it says 'fax' on it - they emailed it to the wrong address.
I've never gotten a mis-sent fax to my personal fax machine. At the office once in a while, but even then it's for someone else in the company.
You can totally fuck off the VoIP phones by misconfiguring the switches and routers in your network, no problem, and then their voices sounds as shitty as the software client. And you can install the software client correctly, and threat the VoIP packets accordingly also in the Desktop LAN, and suddenly the voice quality will be as good as with the hardware phones.
Who says they are unknown? I have caller ID at work. If I'm talking with a co-worker and a customer calls the customer should take priority in most cases. I've done this hundreds of times and it is the proper behavior. It's not rude, it's prudent. Our collective jobs depend on being responsive to our customers and we don't let our egos interfere with that fact.
What will you do if you're on the phone with a customer and another customer calls? Will your caller ID tell you if it is indeed a customer or maybe an unrelated (e.g. "wrong number") caller? How about the possibility of it being a new customer? (not sure if your org has a separate department to handle new signups).
It's only rude if there isn't a clearly understood reason for interrupting the call. My company employs just a handful of people and if a customer calls we need to have someone answer the phone. There is almost nothing I could be doing that would justify me ignoring a call from one of our customers during working hours. Anything I have to say to my coworker can probably wait a few minutes and we all understand that.
This is quite understandable. I was envisioning the above-mentioned scenario of two potentially-equal-priority callers in which case call waiting is a nuisance (that's what busy signals are for). Your "preemptable caller" scenario is a good use case for call waiting + caller id, but it will not always be the case.
Just got a brand new Polycom IP phone system at work. It's fantastic. Web page setup and administration. Crystal-clear voice quality. All-digital hookup to the switch so voice quality is outstanding. Plus, in-network calls are handled by the VPN, so calls to any of our offices in the world are free, and dialing out to any phone number that's local to any office is a local call.
Unless you're usually out of the office, I'm not sure why you'd want to sign up for insane monthly fees and bi-yearly upgrade costs for mobiles.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
The problem comes when you talk about implementing it. Old fashioned phone switches--that was specialized hardware and the client would generally get what the implementer recommended. VOIP *should* use proper hardware as well--but all too often the client says, "It runs on computers? Great! We have a PC down the hall we're not using. We can put it on that."
If you're on company time, you can be fired for anything you do. If it's your phone, outside of company time you can do whatever you want. If it's their phone, it's their rules for their phone all the time.
It's pretty simple, really.
However, one thing I will NOT DO, is ever attach my own phone to an exchange server and allow it to have permission to control literally everything on my phone, from disabling wifi, access to the camera, to forcing a operating system reset. When I first got my phone and that prompt popped up I thought, "You've got to be kidding me. This is real?"
But that's why Voice Mail is useful in the first place - third caller then knows that you are unavailable, and leaves a message. You get to him at the next possible opportunity
Don't these theoretical people own printers? Just about every cheapo multifunction printer I've seen in the last decade can fax.
And before you say 'no one has a land line any more, lol' while it's true there are plenty of people without one, more homes have a landline than don't.
And even in the example you give, why on earth wouldn't they just sign it and fax it back immediately, rather than waiting a day and making another trip to the store?
When I get dozen of requests a day, to sort through and wait to hear the VM its not practical so I ask most of my users to email me instead and its easier to keep track and organize all the requests
It all depends on your company and how they communicate, but I just cancelled a policy with a AAA agent last month because his office was 0/3 in returning voicemails. I had my policy redone with another office, where I get much better customer service.
That being said, I deal exclusively with a troublesome student loans company by phone and voicemail - because by law I can record those conversations. Inflection, sarcasm, level of actual interest, country of origin of your telephone representative - all of those things are lost in email. Think of your personal conversations too. Sobriety, amount of distractions, even some subtle location information. All gone with texts and email.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll keep my voicemail.
What will you do if you're on the phone with a customer and another customer calls?
That's why we have voicemail and a rollover chain. If I cannot answer one of my coworkers does. I'm not the only person who works here but we always try to make sure our customers can reach someone live.
The point is that interrupting a call is not in principle rude. There can be very good reasons to interrupt a conversation. There also can be good reasons to ignore a potential interruption. If I see a telemarketer call I'm probably going to ignore that call if I'm talking with someone important.
I had to check the calendar, but no - it's not the first of April. M$ has flagged Ask as malware, and some journalist has noticed that voicemail is a waste of time. Yay! [OAP happy dance]
Two minutes to get through advertising and stupid menus to hear a distorted message from someone who's probably given up/trying to get through while you are trying to retrieve your voicemail, or woken up to the new thing called eeee-mail.
Am I the only one whose voicemail message says "My phone is either off or out of range - please email me or ring back later."? And yet people still leave messages like "brrrt, crrrtchk, tried to call, gggrch, later".
And WTF is the "press hash after the message" - it just confuses corned beef eaters and potheads (who really don't need more confusion), and it's bullshit - you don't need to press hash - it does nothing.
Mutter, mutter, I hate SMS too. Just send me an email - it's cheaper, it has vowels, I might even reply. Who knows?
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).
I myself got 2 lines from Verizon. One I use exclusively for work related stuff. Other I use exclusively for family related stuff, such as FaceTime and WhatsApp. None of my family members know the first number, and none of my colleagues or clients or customers know the second. So any employer w/ a BYOD policy could take the first phone and do anything w/ it, and I'd be able to accommodate that.
I have always taken a dim view of people who use work equipment for personal stuff. Yesterday, I left my company, and I just cleanly handed over my laptop, w/o needing to change anything, since I did nothing personal there. Similarly, in a past job, I used my company provided cellphone ONLY for work related purposes. Never did any personal banking, for instance, on that phone.
From an ethical standpoint, if a company provides you w/ any equipment - be it a laptop, cellphone, printer, or whatever, they have the right to write the rules of its use however they like. One would also be stupid to use that for personal stuff just b'cos one is too cheap to buy a laptop/tablet/phone of their own. However, if the company has a BYOD policy, they don't have that right - you can use that phone for anything, and the day you leave, you take it w/ you, instead of handing it over. Which is why BYOD just makes no sense to me - not to mention the administrative nightmare in managing different company policies.
Don't these theoretical people own printers?
Maybe. I don't. I don't print much at all these days. Most of the time, I'm working from my home office and a printer or phone isn't worth the desk space to me.
And before you say 'no one has a land line any more, lol' while it's true there are plenty of people without one, more homes have a landline than don't.
That "land line" will often be VoIP, because they got the service in a bundle rather than buying cable a la carte.
And even in the example you give, why on earth wouldn't they just sign it and fax it back immediately, rather than waiting a day and making another trip to the store?
You read before you sign, don't you? I certainly read my mortgage application and that took more than a few minutes. Luckily, everything but the final documents were signed with e-sig and those were printed by the title company.
Pull my finger for my public key.
VOIP is even worse when you have calls b/w VOIP and cellphones. There's only one case I can remember where VOIP made more sense. I lived in a place a stone's throw away from the local DHS office. As a result, cellular reception in the area was really poor, as a result of government suppressing such signals. In this case, I used the Vonage app on my cellphone to dial anywhere, so that I could get a good reception.
Customers who use efax can probably find a way around this: they can print the document, sign and scan, and then efax it back to him. He gets a printout from his fax machine and knows no better about how it was sent.
The reason they don't tell you to scan and email it is that email is not considered a secure or verifiable method of communication.
Neither is a fax.
Most faxes these days are actually emails going from one email server to another, with sometimes multiple complicated digital-to-analog and back again conversions. It is perverse.
Even IF you had the nearly impossible analog fax to fax, there is no way to prove in a court that the documents are valid. They can be easily manipulated before sending.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Your hate is righteous. Keep the faith.
There is NOTHING beneficial about a fax over a scanned and emailed document.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
I've only ever used voice mail when incredibly drunk. I actually think phones should have a needle to perform blood tests, so that once your blood alcohol levels are too high, you can only call taxi services and pizza places.
Significant savings from eliminating voicemail? Huh? Admittedly, I didn't watch the video but I can't see where these savings come from. We use an asterisk phone system and reasonably modern hard drives can store years worth of voicemail for thousands of users.
I love voicemail. Lets me decide whether or not a call is important enough for me to interrupt my workflow without annoying the caller too much.
Then how do I leave a message? Answering machine?
The legal profession has embraced electronic signatures. At my work we use DocuSign for the majority of contracts with our vendors.
Not all participants in the legal profession have embraced e-sigs. For example, my wife and I needed to get a power-of-attorney (POA) so that I could a home purchase deal while she was out of the country. That was just a week ago. And the POA was required to be signed, in blue ink, before taking it to the court house.
Even in real estate, there are participants who, for one reason or another, still demand sigs. For the same property we are trying to close, the seller (a trust) required us to use ink signatures, which we found it very unusual since we have been doing e-sigs for ages.
For as long as someone demands an ink signature for something someone else wants, and there are now laws demanding e-signatures to be accepted when offered, we are going to have ink sigs. And that is going to be the case for a long, long time to come.
I worked at an office that handled medical insurance claims, and we had fax machines. We would routinely exchange information with customers via fax. We upgraded to a fax server from our physical fax machines, and at the same time, to a voip solution. The fax trail went something like this:
Paper (analog) to PDF (digital) via a scanner sent to user's workstation. PDF (digital) to fax server which places a FAX phone call using an analog audio modem signal (PSK). VOIP inherently converts the analog signal to Digital, until it reaches the POTS, where it is converted back to analog. Analog signal reaches the destination fax machine, where it is printed digitally.
With so many D/A and A/D conversions, we regularly had failed fax attempts due to line noise, quantization noise, etc.... It's amazing even a single fax ever got through. Many times, the customers just gave up.
I remember back when I was a kid, and having the phone ringing into forever was normal. And then it wasn't... and now, I guess it will be? I get the savings incentive, but why not just replace the inbox with a voice-to-text converter and have it send the user an email?
I encourage all of our competitors to do the same.
I know it is difficult for some to understand they exist at the pleasure of their customers. Have no F*#$**$# business dictating to customers how we are to be contacted. The majority use email yet some prefer phone and voice messaging.
Regardless even VMs end up as emails in everyone's email inboxes. Unless your PBX was invented in a land before time there is little to be whining about.
This is what surprises me. Why don't we have multiple profiles for a given phone so you can pop in a new SIM card and have your company load and manage their stuff seperateely from your personal stuff?
That way businesses can remote wipe employee phones when the employee leaves.
It is just a software why hasn't some one done it yet?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Sure, because they cost so much less than voicemail.
Just another day in Paradise
Pardon my ignorance, but who does that anymore?
You would be amazed. Hell I do our company payroll and you would be astonished at the number of companies that literally CALL in their hours (very tedious and error prone) rather than using a simple web interface. Lots of people REALLY do not like to change.
The Cisco phones I've seen have a menu (small one, but its there) that you can see caller id, time and length of each message and select it directly.
Better but you still have to listen to the whole message. Doesn't help you when you are working remotely either. The system I use works whether I'm in the office or not.
I just really don't understand anyone that doesn't have something like visual voice mail.
Lots of people don't even know there are alternatives out there. Google voice is NOT known to the majority of people out there. Even people that do know about it often are resistant to change.
I've been using VoIP and SIP phones for the last decade. I didn't even know there were still other options? I thought all the office buildings were wired for Ethernet and that everyone used their desk phone's ethernet jack as an extra port to connect their laptop.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I was just on the phone with a subordinate, and saw that I had another call from someone who I'd been waiting two days to reach regarding a very large contract. Based upon some folks comments, I should not have interrupted my ongoing call because that's supposedly rude...seriously? I could have let them to to voicemail (in most cases I would have, and I'm very happy we're not losing VM because I'm on the phone most of the day). Instead, I politely asked my sub to hold for a moment while I took the call. I then asked the other party if I could call them back in two minutes (since they had been so difficult to reach) when I expected to complete my ongoing discussion.
I see the removal of VM as a penny-wise pound foolish proposition. The loss of a single customer could easily be worth more than the amount saved.
Just another day in Paradise
Of course, there are folks who appear to be *terrified* of actually talking to another person over a telephone, and ignore their voicemail all the time.
So,turn off voicemail... and then set up your phonemenu system so that there's almost no way to get to an actual person.... It took me a while for just that reason when I was putting in a tech support call from work to HP.
Anything other than have enough staff to respond to your customers.
mark
Yes, in this rural area many people still cling to the old landline and yes, multifunction printers more than about three years old often had a fax function. Which nobody uses, because it was a trouble-plagued sonovabitch to set up for that one fax a year from the investment company. Homes don't have dedicated fax lines, so you had to contend with faxes coming in on a voice line.
And the fax function is on the old printer. When it dies, it will be replaced by a new all-in-one, which now no longer has a fax function.
My company of 80 employees has already done this, nobody has a phone on their desk except for the customer service reps.
I remember going into one place a few years ago and if I wanted to use their phone system I had to sign up for a training course. A training course...to use a fucking phone. I told them no thanks...catch me on my cell.
If someone wants to get in touch with me then send me a text...or hit me up on Skype. If I'm available I'll answer right then and there. If I don't answer right away it means I'm busy and I'll get back to you when I can. Simple. Calling me out of the blue imposes your schedule on me.
Part of the problem is the anonymous robocalls. If I don't recognize the number I'm not picking up. If you don't leave a message then I know you are a pest and I'll block your number.
Next up, email. Biggest time waster in corporate America.
Not if the voicemail was converted into an avi file and then forwarded via email.
I believe that Blackberry has something similar to this. It allows you to separate business from personal data. So if the phone is lost or stolen the company could wipe the business half without touching the personal half. I haven't used it personally but it sounds like a good idea in theory.
It might depend on country. Offices I've worked in still have Centrex telephone systems, but mostly now they are used for participating on committee/group discussions when you can't make it to the conference rooms with the Polycom microphones. The only time anyone ever used voicemail was for receiving calls from people on the other side of the planet and on a different timezone.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
It seems most phone calls I get are from robotelemarketers. Sometimes the person will leave message of "hello, hello, anyone there?" as if they didn't listen to the intro "please leave a message after the tone." If you don't want to leave a message, you should have understood nobody is home (with exception of do I want to pick up the phone for someone important like a friend calling for realtime conversation).
What gets me is people who leave longwinded messages, talking at slow-slow rate. Then at end of their "War and Peace novel" message, they leave their phone number at warp speed.
mfwright@batnet.com
This is what surprises me. Why don't we have multiple profiles for a given phone so you can pop in a new SIM card and have your company load and manage their stuff seperateely from your personal stuff?
For the same reason we don't have multi-SIM phones in the U.S. The carriers won't sell as many phones, and that's what it's all about. Why do you think they calls us consumers now instead of customers?
--- Keep the choice with the user..
From an ethical standpoint, if a company provides you w/ any equipment - be it a laptop, cellphone, printer, or whatever, they have the right to write the rules of its use however they like. One would also be stupid to use that for personal stuff just b'cos one is too cheap to buy a laptop/tablet/phone of their own.
The U.S. worker feels it's their god given right to use company equipment for personal use during working hours, regardless of the hazard to the companies data and network.
I used to work IT for a small county courthouse. I was wiping the same crap off the workstations of the same people and giving the same lectures almost weekly. The County Judge wouldn't let me lock them down for fear of a lawsuit. Theses were machines with access to personal and county records. Kinda scary, now that I think of it.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
I wouldn't answer my desk phone if I were in a meeting, or having a conversation with someone. So I would get a lot of voice mail, it took a lot of passive-aggressive behavior to get people to stop leaving me voicemail.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If on the personal stuff, it's just to check emails, some online banking & personal internet browsing, one's own phone or tablet would do just as well. So if I'm on such a trip, I'd take my work laptop, my work phone and my personal phone w/ me. With the personal phone, handle any family calls, do WhatsApp or FaceTime and maybe browse some favorite websites - including porn. W/ the work laptop, just do the work I was supposed to be doing, and w/ the work phone, just use it to talk to or text colleagues or the client/customer I am visiting.
So people can't leave you voicemail, and they can't get you if you're already busy. You expect them to type up something in 15 minutes instead of spitting it out in 5. Hope you have just as much trouble getting hold of anybody you need to talk to for anything!!! It's amazing how self important some people can be.
For something like that, I'd just take my personal phone w/ me as well and FaceTime them. Same deal!
Me too. Work Phone: the red light lets me know the line is working. One day they reset my voicemail and the red light was off, and something felt wrong all day. Fortunately someone left a new voicemail towards the end the day and the reassuring glow that my phone works was back.
Android phone: the little icon of a cassette tape might be burned in to the top left of the screen for all I know; it has been lit for over a year.
Use TouchDown to connect to corporate exchange. It makes a nice little "zone" the corporate server can erase if they so choose, and your personal stuff is invisible to it. Also the PIN requirements will only apply to the things within the app itself, not your entire phone. Pretty handy!
That works out. If they can't be bothered to arrange their thoughts into an email, I won't be bothered with decoding their disorganized verbal ramblings from a message.
If they want something from me, they will put it in the format I prefer. Similarly, there are people who prefer voicemail or forms over emails, and I will happily oblige by making my request in whatever format they prefer.
It's amazing how self important some people can be.
First, Let me resolve your insult. I'm a SW architect for a large project, I have about 3 dozen people who contact me on a regular basis, ranging from engineer to project manager to director. I'm not self-important, I just play a very central role right now.
The problem I have with phone calls is that it takes people 10 minutes to ask a cogent question by voice, and they waste 10 minutes of my time in the process. I would rather they spent 20 minutes writing an email and I spend 5 minutes reading and replying to it. With an email, I can forward it or add other people or archive it. If it requires a two way conversation, I schedule a meeting, perhaps including one or two other people who can observe and learn so I don't have to repeat myself needlessly.
If I let everyone interrupt me at any time with questions, I would really not get any work done. Because it usually takes me several minutes after an interruption to refocus on my original task.
If I need someone, I don't go over to their cube (since it could be in Finland or Shanghai, plus it's annoying), and I don't try to leave a voicemail (for the obvious reason I don't answer mine).
If the building is in fire, or a customer is waiting for them in the lobby, I call their cellphone, then email them, then text them, then repeat.
If I only had some minor questions, I send an email and then set the problem aside until they can sync up with me. I have so many other things I can be doing, so even if I hit a roadblock I can still make forward progress on something else.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You know the prank where you leave a burning bag of dog poop on someone's doorstep, then ring the doorbell and run away? Voicemail is like stapling your message to that bag and acting like it's an acceptable way to communicate.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I haven't had VM since I was hired by my employer 5 years ago. All the teams I'm on have group numbers that are manned 24/7. I do have a personal number, but the only people who get that are businesses that ask for a "work number" the ringer for that line has always been turned off and no vm so they get ring after ring without an answer. I don't even know if anyone has ever called it. Any calls that I might care about will come to our group line, usually from clients that have no access to our system and need us to assist them; or more commonly "Hey customer service gave me this number, can you guys do X?"; and my favorite "I forgot my badge, can someone let me in?"
"If stupid things work...then they are not stupid."
Don't buy brand name phone on a contract. I bought a generic Chinese android phone from Aldi (German supermarket chain) it cost about $150, has two sim sockets, microsd socket and is MINE to do whatever I want with. Change plan, change carriers, use two carriers at the same time, go overseas and use my local number AND my international number... If a carrier is giving you a phone for "free" why would you expect anything other than to be royally fucked by that carrier?
sustainable living
"They often have to hang up and run down the hall to find a real phone"
as some one who manages cisco VOIP and has deployed and used Jabber and Skype for business (Lync) softphones... "They" are doing it wrong.
They do much more than voicemail. I kept avoiding one for the longest time. Eventually I caved and got my own personal secretary and it was great. Of course I had sex with her and ended up divorced so, still, she was great and it was worth it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Whenever someone gave me the wrong number and the resulting number was their fax machine (this happened a bit too often but does not happen now) I would wait for the noises to stop and reply with hums, dings, beeps, and whistles. I do not know if I said anything in machine language but I always hoped it was somehow rendered as a dirty picture in ASCII.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I just migrated a small rural county from a legacy Nortel PBX to a Cisco UM system and I was surprised at how many analog ports they required for faxing. Quite a few (we ended up installing something like 3 VG224's and 7 VG204's)... and they are used quite a bit - so the fax isn't dead yet. And I've yet to run into a customer that has said "nah - we don't need no stinking voice mail system!".
I'm starting to see corporate instant messaging and "presence" more and more commonplace. Easier to send a quick IM, or see if they're "green" (as in available) to shoot them a quick call... rather than call, wait 4 rings, listen to their stupid outgoing message if I can't get past it with #, and leave a message that won't get returned. Internally, we use Microsoft Lync - which in spite of it being a Microsoft product - works really well. Voice mails go to e-mail - so I can read the (not always perfect) speech to text transcription. But for the most part - we use IM and e-mail.
The hardware is cheap (most of the time it's just a regular ol' server), the software is practically free. The bulk of those costs are for the per-user licensing - because if you don't have licensing - the system won't work beyond a post-install grace period. Also you need maintenance through a local vendor/reseller - someone who'll show up at 2:00 am when the system shits the bed... along with manufacturer support (i.e., PASS for Nortel/Avaya CallPilot or SmartNET for Cisco Unity) - for which without you cannot get software patches, service packs, upgrades, and support if the local vendor can't figure out the problem.
For a large company the server's alone could cost 200-300 thousand for a cluster of boxes and dedicated storage plus backup solution, assume a 5 year life cycle, and that is 1.5 million per 5 years.
Licensing some enterprise software can be really expensive also. If it requires an oracle database on the back-end, then you are looking at 50K per processor per year. Say you want highly available stuff. Then double that Oracle cost, and add Data Guard for another 10K per processor. Then license the voice software itself, backup software and agents, etc.. it adds up fast when you are building big systems. http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/technology-price-list-070617.pdf