I am old enough to remember when there wasn’t such a thing as anyone having an answering machine or any business having voice mail service. I might have been just a kid during that time, but I do remember it (right along with rotary phones).

As it turns out, voice mail isn’t being used as much as it used to be. And when I say “isn’t being used”, in that linked article you’ll notice it’s not the act of leaving messages that’s just in decline, but actually retrieving messages as well. There’s a big ol’ pile of digital dust cropping up from people who never even bother to listen to their voice mail at all.

Personally, I hate voice mail and pretty much always have. Answering machines never bothered me because the number of messages is stated right on front of the machine, there are no prompts to go through and the tactile experience of a TAM isn’t really annoying at all. Everything about voice mail on the other hand irritates the sh*t out of me.

I should note that not all voice mail service is pure evil. Certain digital phone providers do offer a software app you can install on your computer to access your voice messages that way, allowing you to point-and-click through them easily, and also allows to play/pause/rewind/fast-forward in a very simple, straightforward way. But unfortunately not too many digital phone providers offer this convenience, and on cell phones (even smartphones) you’re not that much better off.

The only method of voice mail I prefer these days is Google Voice for the reason it has the transcribe feature, which sends the transcribed voice message in text to your email and/or your cell phone as a text message. I like that a lot because it’s much more manageable. Every phone service should offer this option. If you’ve never used it before, believe me when I say that once you start using it, you never go back.

For you Skype users out there, they have a transcribe feature also, but unfortunately they charge for it while Google Voice is free.

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