Can anyone tell me why the cell phone doesn’t just go Beeeep at the end of our greetings?
Why does the cyber lady come on the line to tell us how to leave a message and offer us more options? I realize that for most providers you can skip the message by typing the # sign and just leave a message, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes you are met by the cyber lady who asks “Please enter your pass code” quite sternly. Then you really can’t hang up and call right back to wait through the time consuming prompts about how to leave a message and how to send a page. Who sends a page anyway?
Seems to me that either the phone company thinks we’re really really stupid and after about 35 years of practice suddenly become terrified and freeze when the tiny little machine goes beeeep and are trying to reassure us, or else they’re working you and me out of a few precious minutes from our billing plans every single time we make a call which involves leaving a message.
Why just today I was wading through a friend’s prompts today and actually found myself feeling antagonized by the increasing popularity of the cyber lady. Sometimes it’s a cyber man, but he doesn’t ever seem to understand me when I speak, no matter how clearly or repeatedly. When I get the cyber man at United I usually just say “Operator!” He understands that just fine.
Still, I think it’s time we retired the patronizing instructions on how to leave a message on a mobile telephone already. Don’t you?
4 Comments
Uber-annoying. When I hear the prompts, I resentfully think that it’s them squeezing more minutes out of the transaction. I’m sure that was alll stragegically planned/measured.
Even funnier though is how some real people still leave messages about “leave me a message after the beep…” Surely, they know that we know how to leave a message. I suspect it’s a symptom of outgoing message anxiety when people do that.
I completely agree. I think the cyber lady should get bent.
Gee willikers, my iphone doesn’t have a cyber lady or nothin’. Just me not mentioning a beep and then a beep. Bad iphone…. Not doing what everybody else is doing….
it’s to eat up your air time before you leave them a message. if they can get you one second past the minute mark, that’s a whole ‘nother billable minute.