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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~
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
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
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
Fax machines are dead.... voice mail is dead.......
hmmm a lot of people didn't get the memo.
Yea, it was sent out via Fax. Didn't you get it?
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
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.
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.
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.
Except when the majority of people you get a voicemail from has a sufficiently thick accent that transcription leaves an indecipherable jumble of words.
"My car hill devil cream pewter shakes dawn under noticable with. Read line on palestine." is an actual transcription of a single sentence of a voicemail I received from a client. Allow me to relay what the customer actually said in the recording:
"My goddamn computer shut down without notice and there's a red light on the power brick." (This turned out to be from a short that developed in the client's $3 powered USB hub that he got off ebay, for those interested.)
My voicemail gets full of these types of transcriptions daily, and I frankly find them useless. Sometime's they'll be closer to where there's enough context that makes it through to decipher the message. Unfortunately, more often than not, the transcriptions are worse than the example I used. I've used both Sprint's offering for Visual Voicemail (on promo only...it wasn't worth paying for), and Google hangouts VV. Neither are worth having.
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
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.
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.
There's this wonderful new invention called E-mail, maybe you've heard of it?
Of course I have heard of it, but people who call looking for a rent house don't leave their e-mail, they leave their phone number.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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.
Sure, because they cost so much less than voicemail.
Just another day in Paradise
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.