I'm thinking of dropping voice mail from my home telephone line. I know it's a convenience for other people, so they can tag me as “it” and stop calling, but I've grown increasingly disdainful of the feature.
True, incoming calls would ring busy if I were on the phone. On the other hand, I dislike having to pick the phone up again after a long call to check if I have a message.
The past few weeks I've received multiple phone-spam messages dropped directly into my home voice mailbox by Ma Bell. I don't know what the spam was selling because as soon as I'd hear “Hello, my name is Marsha Annoyingvoice, and I represent—" a quick press of double-7 would delete the message.
Note that these aren't telemarking calls I've missed. These are recorded advertisements dropped right into my voice mailbox. Bell charges me for the voice mail feature, then sells ads to place into my mailbox. I resent that, and even though I'm sure there's some hoop I could jump through to opt out I think I'm simply going to drop the feature altogether in protest. I vote with my wallet.
The twist is that I don't think I'll replace voice mail with an answering machine. The vast majority of the time when I call somebody else and get shunted to voice mail I don't bother to leave a message. And as often as not I delete my own messages unheard because I'm too lazy to listen to them.
What you call rude, I call eccentric.
