"Woohoo, voicemail!"
Do you ever think that? I don't. I see the red light on my work phone and I feel like I've been sternly called into the boss's office.
Voicemail is among my least favorite forms of communication, somewhere between "barely legible Post-It note" and "swift kick to the shins." The good news is, I think it will soon go the way of the pager and the overhead projector, and here's why:
It's awkward. There is something disconcerting about hearing one side of a conversation. It's why hearing a stranger yammer on their cell phone is more annoying than hearing two people chatting nearby. Our brain perceives the gaps and longs to fill them with replies or questions. I'll sometimes say, "Wait, what was that?" while replaying a voicemail, but the person at the other end never pauses.
It's slow. My office phone won't let me delete a message until I've played it all the way through. This is annoying when our school district's auto-dialer leaves a 3-minute recording listing every after-school activity that's cancelled because of the truly awful weather. (All of them. They're all cancelled. Let's move on, please.)
Replying isn't always simple. When you receive an email, you can see who it's from and reply with a click. About once a month, I get a voicemail from an elderly woman who has mistaken my office phone number for that of her adult son or daughter. She begins with "Hi, it's your Mom" in heavily accented English, then switches into an unfamiliar Asian language for a 15-20 minute monologue which ends with "Call me, I miss you." I don't know how to tell her she has the wrong number. Meanwhile, her actual son or daughter is receiving bilingual guilt trips for never returning Mom's calls.*
It puts the burden on the receiver. Is leaving a long voicemail easier than sending an email message? Yes, for the person who's leaving the message. Email requires you to organize your thoughts. Texting requires you to pare down your message to its most essential components. A stream-of-consciousness voicemail is much easier to give than to receive.
It's mostly obsolete. Answering machines and voicemail filled a gap before email or texting, when you needed to get a message to a person who wasn't available to take your call. Pagers and fax machines were handy, too, but we're doing fine without them.
It's the worst of both worlds. Talking on the phone has some huge advantages over written communication: You can hear tone of voice, express empathy, and engage in warmer dialogue than via email. But much of that warmth dissipates when you're leaving a soliloquy at the command of a disembodied robot voice.
I can think of two scenarios in which voicemail is the best tool available: 1. When you're driving (although, really, 99% of the time, it can wait) and 2. When you need to reach somebody, the only contact info you have is their phone number, and you're not sure if that number accepts texts.
If you can think of another scenario, let me know. Just don't leave me a voicemail.
Replying isn't always simple. When you receive an email, you can see who it's from and reply with a click. About once a month, I get a voicemail from an elderly woman who has mistaken my office phone number for that of her adult son or daughter. She begins with "Hi, it's your Mom" in heavily accented English, then switches into an unfamiliar Asian language for a 15-20 minute monologue which ends with "Call me, I miss you." I don't know how to tell her she has the wrong number. Meanwhile, her actual son or daughter is receiving bilingual guilt trips for never returning Mom's calls.*
It puts the burden on the receiver. Is leaving a long voicemail easier than sending an email message? Yes, for the person who's leaving the message. Email requires you to organize your thoughts. Texting requires you to pare down your message to its most essential components. A stream-of-consciousness voicemail is much easier to give than to receive.
It's mostly obsolete. Answering machines and voicemail filled a gap before email or texting, when you needed to get a message to a person who wasn't available to take your call. Pagers and fax machines were handy, too, but we're doing fine without them.
It's the worst of both worlds. Talking on the phone has some huge advantages over written communication: You can hear tone of voice, express empathy, and engage in warmer dialogue than via email. But much of that warmth dissipates when you're leaving a soliloquy at the command of a disembodied robot voice.
I can think of two scenarios in which voicemail is the best tool available: 1. When you're driving (although, really, 99% of the time, it can wait) and 2. When you need to reach somebody, the only contact info you have is their phone number, and you're not sure if that number accepts texts.
If you can think of another scenario, let me know. Just don't leave me a voicemail.
* This is especially weird, because I also have an immigrant mother whom I don't call often enough. She leaves me sweet voicemails in Polish, in which she introduces herself as my Mom. I'm teaching her to email.
"called into the principal's office" --thanks EXACTLY what it feels like Monica! Perfect post--I'm so ready to say goodbye to voicemail too.
ReplyDelete