OK, maybe that’s a little bit much, but here’s the story: it’s been estimated that making us listen to that ridiculous “at the tone, please record your message . . .” drivel before letting us leave a voice mail, cell phone companies are making us spend an extra $600 million every year on minutes.
And that doesn’t account for wasted time, which is probably a bigger deal than the minutes for most people with calling plans and buckets of minutes (though maybe not for pay-as-you-go users, who this costs money directly).
David Pogue, an old friend and the king of the technology beat at The New York Times, has been on a bit of a rant lately at his blog. Frankly, I think he’s going on a bit too much, but the point is real, and here’s the tip that matters:
When you reach a voice mail box and want to leave a message without listening to the phone company’s extra silliness, just press 1*#, one after the other. Doing so will get you directly to “the beep”.
In keeping with our theme of “change and what you can do to adapt”, this is actually a big deal. I’ve been aware of how annoying I found this issue for years, and Dave has pointed out a simple solution to the issue of not knowing what carrier you’ve called or what their code is: just stack the “get me there right now” commands for all of the cell phone carriers.
It works; I’ve been using this tip for about a week now. Good work, David Pogue!
