Changing communication technology is one of life’s endless annoyances. Voice Messages allows smartphone owners to record their own voice and send the recording to others just like they would text or chat.
According to The Wall Street Journal, some people find the technique cumbersome and disrespectful.
I have experienced many changes in telephony technology in my life.
When I was a kid in the 70s, I would freak out whenever the phone rang and rush to find out who was calling our house. As hard as it may be to imagine, there was no caller ID. There was no call waiting. If someone calls you while you are talking on the phone, that person will be greeted with a busy signal.
Or worse, if you need to drive home after soccer practice, good luck. My girlfriend’s 5 sisters and my mother used her one phone line of ours all day long. I spent half of my high school days redialing payphones. The truth is, we actually wanted to answer the phone and find out who was calling.
Nothing is more frustrating than answering a ringing phone too late and a mysterious caller hanging up. That started to change in the 70’s when answering machines became affordable and many started using them to screen calls.
Here’s what’s even more rude: Some people refuse to leave messages on their answering machines for whatever reason. It was very upsetting to come home and hear the answering machine hang up.
Until “*69” was invented. Typing those three keys into your phone will give you the number of some dirty rotten person who has the audacity to call your house and leave no message. This allowed me to call the rude person back and wait for the answering machine to play before hanging up.
And technology-enabled rudeness began to spread.
Now, when our smartphones ring, we check who the rude person is and before sending it to answering machine, we say, ‘Why couldn’t an idiot text me like a normal person? Is it?”
This will display your voice message.
As a very impatient person, I am too busy to hear other humans using spoken language to convey human thoughts to me. The inflections and shifts in tone they use to get their point across may seem more human and nuanced to them, but it just makes me grumpy.
See, I’m a master procrastinator who wastes time all day — but I resent others wasting my time by having to send voice chats and spend their precious time. For goodwill, email me or text me and tell me the words to read.
I will email you or text you back with some good words for you to read. Then the two of us can go down a hilarious path to furthering the rudeness, gruffness, and rudeness that have allowed our technology to create an unfortunate reality in modern life.
I leave the following warnings:
Keep sending me voice messages and I promise to buy a cheap cell phone that won’t reach me.I’ll call your home phone.
Copyright 2022 Tom Purcell, exclusively distributed by Cagle Cartoons Newspaper Syndicate. Purcell is a humor columnist. Send an email to Tom@TomPurcell.com.
