How many people do you know who don’t have a mobile (I refuse to call it a “cell”) phone? Probably not many… How about people who have never used an answering machine? Probably even less right? Using an answering machine is a very simple concept. You call, it answers and presents a pre-recorded message telling you that your intended recipient did not answer the call for one reason or another, it gives you a signal to start recording a message, you leave the message and you hang up. Very simple, a routine pattern that’s so engraved in our heads that we can do it just about on auto pilot. Most people leave almost the exact same message every time…. that’s because we are accustomed to this procedure and we’ve become experts at it.

Enter the revolutionary concept of the MOBILE phone… they’ve been around now for about 15 years and just about everyone from Grandma to many Kindergartners have their own phones. One of the convenient features of these devices is voicemail. Voicemail is simply a personalized version of the aforementioned answering machine. Same exact concept just facilitated through your mobile phone network… right? Wrong..

You would think the process should be driven by the same exact guidelines. You call, the voicemail picks up, time to leave a message right? Nope, not so. Just about the time you should leave the message things go woefully awry.

Instead of the message ending and a beep promptly signaling you time to speak we get something quite different that what we’ve grown to expect from our extensive voicemail/answering machine experience. We get the “Mobile Phone Instruction Fairy”.

Despite the fact that we’ve all sufficiently grasped the whole voicemail concept, our wonderful mobile providers feel the need for the Fairy to explain, step-by-step, what we should do and how we should do it? What in Hell would give them the impression that we need instructions for voicemail? I can pretty much guess that I need to wait for the beep… I know I can hang up when I’m done speaking. What else would make sense? “A callback number”… Won’t my message leave a number where they can reach me? “To Page this Person…” Again, won’t my message be a fairly accurate means of letting them know who called?

Ok, maybe 5 years ago, when personal phones were really starting to catch on, it was perhaps appropriate to offer the instructions but they should eventually turn them off. Or at least give me a way to turn them off!! Hell, there may indeed be a way, but it’s not obvious or convenient and I’m most certainly not going to waste an hour talking to “customer service”.
No one needs these instructions or wants to hear them ever again. Take our word for it Mobile Telecom Gods, we get it…. We understand voicemail… We understand the “wait for the beep concept”, we understand the “hang-up when we’re finished” concept. Would you consider ditching the instructions and maybe help us figure out a way to make our signals strong enough to use more than half the time?

For the big three-o, I decided to splurge on myself (…) and I bought this shiny new “Blog” (that’s short for Web Log). I catch myself from time to time documenting random thoughts, gripes and gratitudes and decided to be trendy and archive ’em here. Most likely no one will ever know this is here, but that’s ok. I’m really doing it for myself (& my wife, now she’ll have a documented history of me losing it). I know I’m notorious for subtle (sometimes blatant) grammatical errors, hopefully that will improve with time. I hated English in high-school, now I pay.

My entries should range from entertaining to excruciating with several floors between. That’s ok though, one additional goal for this endeavor is thought refinement. Learning what to parse, what to discard, and what threads deserve brain time. Every painful entry will teach me what angles, topics and presentations to shy away from.