The Answerphone

They call answering machines, "answer phones" here. Strictly speaking, we're all voicemail here. The Brits call it voicemail, I call it voicemail. Whatever it is called, the voicemail at Oxford Brookes is ridiculous. I know, you're wondering what my blogging obsession with phones is. Let's just say that the telecommunications industry keeps providing the fuel for this fire.

As part of your new staff welcome, they give you an 'induction pack' that includes everything you need to know to work here. It's a useful piece of kit. It is particularly useful when one goes to use their voicemail. I found it slightly odd that I had to dial the somewhat random number "3000" to get my voicemail. Then you have to enter your 4-digit pin. You then get a long welcome which you can't skip. You then get some choices. Press 1 to listen to your messages is entirely normal. After you have listened to your message (this is where I get the feeling that the system hasn't been updated since some telephone engineeer-type put it together in 1992) you have the option to "listen to your next message, press 3. Or, for more options, press star". Press 3? What happened to 1 and 2? Star for more options? Hmmm, that sounds intriguing. Since I'd now either like to save the message or delete the message, I'll go down mystery star selection...

So, what do you think happens next having pressed "*"? Well, you get the full slate of 9 choices. Forward, save and remove all fall under the same option: pressing "0". Okay, I'll press "0". Again, 6 options including forwarding the message, saving the message and returning to the previous menu. Thankfully, removing the message is also under this list. You press the very intuitive "hash" (#) key. Yes, every time you want to delete a message, you have to press three different keys. If you do it too quickly (becuase you've learnt the sequence) it will spit you right back to the begining: "to listen to you messages, press 1". It's a little thing, but it drives me nuts.

Then, to compound the problem, you have to listen to a message in its entirety. You can't select to delete or skip half way through a message. You're committed to the message. When you have someone rambling on the voicemail you can't skip. You know who it is, what they want and their phone number but there will be no skipping or premature deleting of the message. No, no. With this voicemail, you will sit and listen. All the time with your finger poised to go through the secret sequence of keys that will delete the message once it is finished (but not too quickly!).

This listen to the whole message system was a feature of a past voicemail system I encountered. I think Jason Hildebrand and I may have contributed to a revision and overhaul of the Industry Canada's (Federal Government) voicemail in the mid 1990s. Jason and I lived with Lisa Brake. She wasn't Lisa Brake at that time, but a young and impressionable Lisa Reifenstein. Somehow, Jason and I had ended up with a phone number for a Federal Government program to discourage smoking amongst youth. They appealed to the public to phone in catchy marketing slogans to a voicemail. Fools. Being a free call and the fact that Jason and I had just gotten back from a coffee that had somehow taken a wrong turn at the local bar, we started phoning this number and leaving ridiculous messages. The idea was not vulgarity or offense: merely to make whoever checked the messages laugh. For the better part of an hour we phoned this number with every ridiculous accent we could dream up. After about an hour, we started to bore and decided to phone Lisa's work phone number and leave the messages for her instead. This was much funnier for us. We could hardly dial the number, we were laughing so hard at ourselves. [The photo is of us flatmates: Lisa, me, Anu and Jason at one of the ridiculous parties we had... and standing in front the recently tinfoiled walls because it had better reflective qualities for the discoball.]

It eventually became so raucous that Lisa wandered into the room to see what we were up to. She must have suspected we were somehow doing damage to something. We explained that we were phoning the Govenment anti-smoking campaign number (but, of course, we had already switched to phoning her work number). She quickly saw the humour of leaving messages for some stranger to have to wade through. Fifteen minutes later, Lisa was in on the action. Leaving absurd messages is painful accents. The revelry continued for ages. Being a work day, however, we did evenutally go to bed.

The next day, I got the funniest email from Lisa. It amounted to, "you guys suck." Unable to skip through the messages, she was forced to listen to the whole evening before again--while at work, and including her own abuse of the messaging service. At lunch, poor Lisa had a sore neck from holding the phone to her ear while trying to work as hours of cackling messages crawled by, just waiting for each to finish so she could delete them.

Of course, I am not advocating such behaviour be applied to my work phone. And, just in case, I won't be giving out my work number to anyone who might read this! I merely want to point out that a decade on and Brookes is still using a similar voicemail.