Change Your Goddam Voice Mail Message! (Pass It On)
Starting today, your outgoing voice mail message should start (and quite possibly end) with:
Hi this is [insert your name here]. Press [star or pound] to leave a message.
I probably don’t have to explain why. But I will.
1. Everybody hates waiting through your message, and they really hate waiting through the instructions on how to leave a message.
2. You never know whether pound or star will bypass all that crap. Each voicemail system’s different. If you press the wrong one, you’re really pissed off because … you know. So you wait through the goddam message and instructions.
It takes a good twenty seconds to go through that crap, every single time.
It’s not just annoying. A back-of-the-envelope calc (based on utterly reliable data randomly sourced from the interwebs) tells me that all those 20-second annoyances are worth about 1.2 trillion dollars a year (if our time is worth $20/hour).
Yeah: if everybody changed their messages, we’d increase our country’s annual GDP by 10%. (Or enjoy the equivalent in more free time.)
Pass it on.
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So when 90%+ of the messages left on one’s machine are pre-recorded telemarketing messages (including such things as political messages and so-called “surveys” which are sales pitches in disguise which are exempt from the “Do Not Call” List), what should one’s message say to inform the calling entity that no one at this number has any interest in listening to their sales pitch now or ever and they should quit calling and have that message listened to and, more importantly, obeyed?
https://www.donotcall.gov/