Ya! that shits annoying! I was just telling my friend that the other day

___________________
My current favorites:
1. Komytea - Exit
2. Helvetic Nerds - Salto (Leventina Mix)
3. Passenger 10 - Avantgarde
4. Scope & Mark Lowry - Muasi
5. Timmy & Tommy - Escape to Fiji!

switch to Youmail.com

1. Works with all carriers
2. its FREE
3. Greatest voicemail service ever.

quote:

Originally posted by altitude Yo socal, One thing that drives me nuts is having to listen to long ass voicemail instructions every time I leave someone a message. * Sprint: "[Phone number] is not available right now. Please leave a detailed message after the tone. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press pound for more options." * Verizon: "At the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press 1 for more options. To leave a callback number, press 5. (Beep)" * AT&T: "To page this person, press five now. At the tone, please record your message. When you are finished, you may hang up, or press one for more options." * T-Mobile: "Record your message after the tone. To send a numeric page, press five. When you are finished recording, hang up, or for delivery options, press pound." I don't know if its just one of my pet peeves but everyone I talk to has the same frustration. Luckily though, with some help from teh internets, we can get the ball rolling to do away with this BS. Check it out http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2009...ml?8cir&emc=cir

Funny that you posted this. The phone companies in Europe slowly tried doing this years ago (making the pre messages longer and longer) until the network watchdogs fined them and made laws against it.

have you noticed that they use a minimum of three sentences and pause between each one as long as possible?

It's bullshit and should be illegal here too - by adding an extra 10-15 seconds to your calls they are increasing their revenues on a single message by 15-20%.

yea exactly. and they also talk so slow, and I swear, each carrier makes sure they have different instructions/keys so that you have to listen. It would be a piece of cake for them to make it all uniform, ie press 5 to page, # to end message, etc etc.

I would love to see this become regulated, I feel like cell phone service providers these days are really screwing the consumer in more ways than one!!

You know, an old roommate of mine knew all these tricks to some carrier's message systems. I dunno the instructions, but he could take my phone and be able to just have it say my message (or the standard message where I only say my name) or _maybe_ have it say my message then "leave a message after the tone" then beep or go straight to a beep and that's it.

If I see him on IM I'll see if he still knows the tricks or if you could do them anymore.

Hehe, here's some tips. Oddly, this was post just yesterday on Engadget

quote:

While we wait for all the carriers to get on board with nixing their endless, unhelpful voicemail pre-beep messages, we've already got instructions from Sprint on how to disable it for your own particular voicemail box on that network. It's pretty easy: 1.Call your voicemail 2.At the menu, press 3 for personal options 3.Press 2 for greeting 4.Press 1 to change the greeting 5.To enable / disable the instructions, press 3 Trust us, we did some serious searching for similar instructions on the other major carriers, but had no luck. If you know of anything, let us know! Update: Thanks to some helpful comments we've got instructions for AT&T and Verizon for lopping off bits of the message, and, in Verizon's case, speeding up the talking. Check 'em out after the break. Consider yourselves upgraded to orange, guys! AT&T There's a "cut through paging" option on AT&T's voicemail, at least for certain customers. It only cuts off that small section of the voicemail instructions (the part about paging somebody), but it's all very unclear and inconsistent. AT&T has been upgraded to orange, and you're free to try these instructions at your own risk: 1.Call your voicemail 2.Go to personal options 3.Go to administrative options 4.Select "cut through paging" 5.Select off Verizon Instructions are a little conflicting, but here's what we've gleaned from the tips. As far as we can tell, Verizon methods can vary by region, so let us know what works for you.Here's what kchinth recommends. 1.Personal options 2.Administrative options 3.General options 4.Then you will have these three options: Auto Play On or Off Call Back Number Prompt On or Off Rapid Prompt or Standard Prompt\

Thats a start, but left a lot to be desired if you ask me, haha. Tmobile is usually pretty good about customer service type stuff...I'm suprised they don't have something similar.

quote:

Originally posted by altitude Thats a start, but left a lot to be desired if you ask me, haha. Tmobile is usually pretty good about customer service type stuff...I'm suprised they don't have something similar.

I'm pretty sure one of the carriers I had he did it on was T-Mobile, but this was years back (like five or six years ago :-p) and maybe it's changed.

He would tell me that it was something you couldn't find online and when I'd look in the past I could never find the info so I'd always just give him my phone. He moved to Seattle a few years back so can't say he still can do it these days...