A Plea for Better Voicemail

Has this ever happened to you? You call someone and they don't pick up, so their voicemail takes over and you hear:

Human voice: "Hi, you've reached (insert name here) and I can't take your call right now. Please leave a message after the beep and I'll call you back as soon as I can." Computer voice: At the tone please record your message, when you have finished recording, simply hang up or press pound for further options... Beeeeeep...

Hey Voicemail programmers, it's time to stop. We've been using answering machines and voicemail systems for nearly 40 years now. We understand how they work. We don't need instructions on how to leave a message every single time we call. Think about how much time is wasted listening to voicemail instructions! We're smart people. Please quit wasting our precious time.

And while we're on the subject, can we please, please, pretty please make the options standard across voicemail systems? The # key should be the skip message button. Period. I don't know how many times I've tried to skip someone's message by hitting the # key and it gives me the option to log into the mailbox I'm calling. And then I have to call back (all the while looking like a super-stalker by calling someone multiple times and showing up as multiple missed calls) and then listen to the message, and then the computer lady explain how voicemail works, and then finally leave a message.

So President-Elect Trump, or maybe even Obama could get this done in the next two months? Maybe one of you fellas could put a special task force together to solve this problem for hard working Americans like me. I'll be the first to volunteer to help. (And while we're at it maybe we can fix CNAM too. But that's a story for another day.) Either way it's simple, all we want is the # key to skip the message, and the * key to log in to the mailbox.

Sincerely,

Zachary Garcia