A PSA for anyone who has a cell phone or calls one...

woodstock

woodstock

Final Approach
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/14/AR2008061400050.html


quote:

The publicists did, however, describe how to skip both a voice-mail greeting and the prompts after it by pressing the right key on your phone. If you're calling a AT&T subscriber, pressing 0 will usually let you start recording your message right away; with a Sprint customer, press 1. for a Verizon user, use the * key, and when phoning a T-Mobile subscriber, hit the # key.
 
A lot of PBX vMails will also let you skip the greeting.

On my companies PBX it is the # key, on the SO's vMail it is ##

Also a lot of those help lines prompts can be overridden with a 0, *0, 00, or ## depending on how they program it.
 
I always knew about Sprint, because I think it tells you that. What drives me NUTTY is calling Verizon... you listen to your friend's greeting (and I have a realtor friend who uses them, so you have to listen to her pitch first) and THEN Verizon tells you to press this for a text, blah blah blah... by the time you are done it's a minute or more... twould be nice if they all told you how to bypass, like Sprint does.
 
It's all to get you to waste more minutes. I can't stand the droning on and on and on. Just when you take a breath to start your message, there's another paragraph of useless information. By the time you're "on" you've forgotten what you were going to say.

My favorite customer service message is, "Please listen carefully, as the menu has changed." I knew the first time I heard that (at least a decade ago) that is was BS just to make you pay attention.
 
I have Alltel, where you have to listen to the greeting and then press 3 if you would like to leave a message. Can't they just make it beep?

I checked into getting this changed after I noticed another Alltel subscriber's voicemail went directly from the message to the beep. It turns out that I could enjoy this feature too, if I wanted to downgrade to "basic" voicemail that stores 15 messages and has a 1-minute-each limit. Currently I can store up to 30 messages of 2 minutes each. Hmm. I doubt I'd ever need more than 15. But can my callers learn to leave messages a minute long or less? Doubt it.

What's funny is that callers sometimes accidentally hit the key that takes you to the paging menu when they meant to leave a message. Then they'll hit #3 which they think is to leave a message, but is actually the button to send me a text message that says "call significant other."
 
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The problem is, how do you know which service the person you're calling has? Unless you know that...
 
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