I hate checking voicemail and always have. You call in, the voice lady takes forever to read the timestamp and the number, both of which you probably already know. Then you have to listen carefully while someone tries to gather their thoughts and talk at the same time. Sometimes you may not be able to understand something they said because it was garbled or they didn't speak clearly, so you're left confused or even having to listen again. In a nutshell: voicemail is inconvenient and inefficient for the listener.

These days, everyone has SMS and email on their phones. This is the best way to reach me. It's easy for the sender to enter in their message in a short, concise format, and it's something you can casually do. With a phone call, you're shutting yourself out from the world around you, you're making noise, and if you're the one calling, you're making the person on the other end fumble around for their phone in a quick haste to answer it, and it may even be an inconvenient time.

Text doesn't have to be answered right away. Say you're in the middle of ordering something at Peet's, a situation which would normally be really annoying to get a phone call. You can let them leave a voicemail but then you have to check it, and you also have to listen for your coffee to be ready. Listening to two things at once is difficult, for me at least. With text, you can simply let it arrive and read it when you're ready while still being able to hear your coffee order. Also, college students will understand how annoying it is to get a phone call in class. You can't check voicemail in class unless you're sly, and if you're like me, you want to know what the call was about so you'll know what kind of action is needed. These may not be the best examples, but you get the idea: phone calls and voicemail are inconvenient and non-practical.

I feel like I'm doing someone a favor by sending a text message. It's like saying, "Hey, I know you might be busy right now, so here's a simple message that won't take too much of your time and focus, and you can get back to me at your convenience." People are usually good a returning text messages in a reasonable time frame, so time-sensitive messages should work fine.

Solutions to cutting out voicemail? If someone calls and I don't answer, I'd rather them just hang up so I see I have a missed call and I'll call them back. Maybe cell carriers can implement a "Press 1 to request a callback" type system, where if a call back is necessary, you'll know. A lot of times people call for no reason, making the callback awkward because they're all, "Oh, I just called to blah blah blah, no big deal."

Another solution came out of the recent iPhoneDevCamp. Andrew reported the top 5 apps to come out of the program and one of them was an app that transcribes your voicemails to text:

Brilliant idea. People who still want to stick with the old style of communication can still leave their voicemails, and I can still consume them the way I want to. I'm excited for this app and hope it works well and comes out soon.

With the rise in text messaging, I'm sure cell carriers are loving the extra fees they get to charge, which are quite ridiculous when breaking down the actual size of the data being sent. This is another issue that needs to get resolved, or at least someone needs to show me how these prices are justified. But that's a rant for another time...

UPDATE: Actually, I just got an iPhone, and visual voicemail is so amazing and pretty much eliminates most of my problems with voicemail. In fact, I kind of like getting voicemail now because it's so easy to listen to now. Anyway, this post still applies to the old way of checking voicemail.