I have voicemail, and I hate it. No, I'm not aiming for that easy target - how dire it is to be directed when you call to a robot voice that doesn't care if you leave a message or not. I mean picking up voicemail. Every day that I come in to find the red light on my office phone flashing is another day that the lost messages in there will go unlistened to. That's right - I don't listen to the voices. How ridiculous has the cult of voicemail become, that writing a sentence like that is frowned on, rather than applauded as a sign of good mental health?

Leaving voicemail is such a spectacularly inefficient way of getting in touch with people. I have a mobile phone and the number's no secret. But some companies prefer to ring an office number. OK, fine, but when I'm not out, it really would save us all a lot of time to just ring me on the phone that I carry around with me, rather than a number I attend only periodically.

I used to try to discourage people from leaving voicemails by having a message that said: "Please don't leave messages here; instead, send me an email." Hearing it, people would ring off and send an email. But the voicemail treated the ringoff as "a message" lasting 10 seconds, so when I came to check my voicemail there were lots of pauses, followed by the announcement "End of message. To hear the message again ..."

This was slightly annoying the first time. But after a few hundred times (say, following a two-week holiday before which you might have changed the message to say "I'm away for two weeks - please don't leave a message"), I was ready to kill the programmers. Especially because while deleting all the non-messages, someone would always ring in; and while we spoke, someone else would ring in, go to voicemail, and leave a message at the end of all those dead air clicks. And while I tried to delete those to reach the new message, someone else would ring ...

That's the real killer about voicemail: it takes much longer to deal with the voicemail than the original message. People ramble. They say their phone number veryquicklyindeedinonebreath. They mumble. They use phones that seem to be located underwater. It's all wasted time.

Most maddening of all, though, are the beautifully spoken ones that take three minutes of introduction and then say, "It's about an email I sent you." Good grief. One thing I do is read emails, even if only the subject line. Some people hate to take silence as an answer.

Is it really so impossible to write even an average speech-to-text converter? I'd settle for anything at the moment. But if you've invented it, for God's sake just email me.

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