Voicemail is among my least favorite forms of communication, somewhere between “barely legible Post-It note” and “swift kick to the shins.”
- It’s visually stressful. Seeing the red light on my work phone makes me feel like I’ve been called into the boss or principal’s office. What awaits is probably just a small amount of work, someone with a question about a thing I might know, or an unsolicited sales pitch, but for some reason the light fills me with low-level anxiety.
- It’s awkward. Hearing one side of a conversation is uncomfortable. It’s why a stranger yammering on a cell phone is more annoying than two people chatting nearby. Our brain perceives the gaps and longs to fill them with replies or questions. I’ll sometimes say, “Wait, what was that?” while replaying a voicemail, but the person at the other end never pauses.
- It’s slow. My office phone won’t let me delete a message until I’ve played it all the way through. Like when my kids’ school leaves a 3-minute pre-recorded message listing every after-school activity that’s cancelled because of the snow. (All of them. They’re all cancelled. Let’s move on, please.)
- Replying isn’t simple. When you receive an email, you see who it’s from and can reply with a click. About once a month, I get a voicemail from an elderly woman who has mistaken my office phone number for that of her adult son or daughter. She begins with “Hi, it’s your Mom” in heavily accented English, then switches into an unfamiliar Asian language for a 15-20 minute monologue which ends with “Call me, I miss you.” I don’t know how to tell her she has the wrong number. Meanwhile, her actual son or daughter is receiving bilingual guilt trips for never returning Mom’s calls.*
- It puts the burden on the receiver. Is leaving a long voicemail easier than sending an email message? Yes, for the person who’s leaving the message. Email requires you to organize your thoughts. Texting requires you to pare down your message to its most essential components. A stream-of-consciousness voicemail is much easier to give than to receive – particularly when they don’t leave a callback number.
- It’s mostly obsolete. Answering machines and voicemail filled a gap before email or texting, when you needed to get a message to a person who wasn’t available to take your call. Pagers were handy, too, but we’re fine without them.
- It’s the worst of both worlds. Talking on the phone has advantages over written communication: You can hear tone of voice, express empathy, and engage in warmer dialogue than via email. That warmth dissipates when your phone call is a soliloquy left at the command of a robot voice.
I can think of two scenarios in which voicemail is the best tool available: 1. When you’re driving (although, 99% of the time, it can wait) and 2. When you need to reach somebody, the only contact info you have is their phone number, and the number doesn’t accept texts.
If you can think of another scenario, let me know. Just don’t leave me a voicemail.
* This is especially weird, because I also have an immigrant mother whom I don’t call often enough. She leaves me sweet voicemails in Polish, in which she introduces herself as my Mom. I’m trying to teach her how to text.
