I have a confession to make: I don’t have voicemail.
I say “confession” like it’s something I should be ashamed of, but the truth of the matter—and, I suppose, the real confession—is that I don’t feel bad at all about not having voicemail. Yeah, so: sorry, not sorry.
I know for a fact that this is annoying to many people. The reason I know this is because they keep telling me how annoying it is—usually to my face, because, you know, no voicemail.
“I tried to leave you a message, but you don’t have voicemail,” they’ll say, usually in the same tone of voice they use when they discover that I don’t have tissues and expect them to blow their nose on toilet paper.
Or sometimes they’ll just be concerned. “Do you know your voicemail isn’t set up yet? Do you not know how? Would you like me to do it for you?” (Conversations like that make me glad I have a screen lock on my phone—I would rather someone publicized my search history than enabled my voicemail function.)
I probably shouldn’t admit this, but in all likelihood I have my kids to thank for the fact that I have no voicemail, because it was only after realizing that they never, ever listened to a single voicemail I sent them that I was able to accept that living a voicemail-free lifestyle was even an option. I figured that if they were able to avoid all of my long-winded instructions, rants and exhortations and still somehow manage to function, than I should be able to live without the political campaigns, appeals for money and rambling stories that I used to get in return. (And those were the calls from my children).
So far it’s worked out great: not only do I never have to scramble to look for a pen so that I can write down a phone number that’s absolutely buried in the middle of a long and tedious voicemail (people, it’s not a mystery novel: your phone number should not be so cleverly concealed in the message that it catches your audience off guard every single time), but it also helps me catch out the people who are trying to convince me I’m either going crazy or senile. (“But I left you a voicemail about it,” they’ll say. “Hmm, that’s funny,” I’ll reply. “I don’t have voicemail.”)
No voicemail also means I don’t have to agonize over my outgoing message. Who would agonize over their outgoing message, you ask? Well, going by some of the really teeth-grindingly awful outgoing messages some of you out there have, I’d say that apparently the answer is: absolutely no one. That’s not to say they shouldn’t be agonizing over it. They most definitely should. (My friend Jack used a recording of his daughters singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in its entirety as his outgoing message for years. When I called him on the awfulness of it he admitted that he was fully aware of the fact that it was so long and tedious that many people just gave up and left no message at all. Which, I think, was his point. His was the passive aggressive version of no voicemail.)
I’d try the same thing, but the truth is the people I most want to avoid voicemail from are my kids, and somehow I think they’d be immune to recordings of themselves. Or at least if not immune, then so determined to leave some bit of bad news that they were willing to suffer it.
Because that’s the real real reason I don’t have voicemail: it made it too easy for my kids to tell me the things they knew I wouldn’t be happy to hear. Like their long-winded explanations as to why we’re out of toilet paper/tissue yet again.