Published Sep 6, 2005

I understand that, with today’s cellular telephone technology, you can contact me at any time. However, that does not mean that you need to contact me at any time; and that does not mean that, if you need to contact me, you should call me. Said cellular telephone technology offers you various methods by which you can effectively, promptly, and appropriately contact me.

As a user of cellular phones these days, you should be familar with the concept of “voicemailing.” This is when the owner of the phone being called chooses to hit the End Call button, sending you to voicemail directly, rather than answering your call. You can rest assured that I do like you, so it’s not highly probable that I’ve sent you to voicemail because I don’t want to talk to you — I’ve probably sent you there because I can’t talk to you. I may be in a meeting or in class or, even, on my porcelain throne. In any case, I’ve given you the opportunity to leave me a message, which allows me to listen to what you have to say at a more appropriate time and reply to it, based on the urgency of your message.

Please do give me the opportunity to return your message at a more appropriate time. When you call back immediately after leaving your message, you make me wonder “is this an emergency?” When you call back five times in an hour and fifteen minutes, you make me think that “this must be an emergency”. So, then, when you say, hey, I was wondering when you’d be free for dinner tonight, well, the answer may be “insofar as I was, until this moment, convinced someone had died, I’ve actually rather lost my appetite.”

Also, when someone has died, I probably won’t answer the fifth time you call me, because I’ll think you’re worrying about, say, what movie we’ll see tonight.

Fortunately, the miracle of modern technology has given us a fine solution to the challenge of asking me a moderately urgent question when I can’t answer my phone. This technology is the text message, the modern update of paging. You can send me a short text message describing your question; I can read this message in class, or a meeting, without being rude, and may even be able to do so in a one-on-one conversation. If you mention that another party to our dinner plans needs to either make a commitment now or make alternate plans, I might even be able to take 15 seconds to reply via text message.

Or I might not. I mean, there is almost certainly some reason why I’m not answering my phone, and the reason is, again, probably not that I don’t like you.

But don’t worry, phone companies can’t get this right either. For the past three weeks, Cingular has regularly called me to tell me that my voicemail upgrade is coming. I didn’t know my old voicemail was broken! I could record an outgoing message, I could listen to and delete incoming messages, I don’t really think I need any more functionality.

Actually, after the upgrade, I don’t think I got any more funcationality. Well, I don’t need to enter my password to get in, when I’m calling from my phone. And I can now delete messages by pressing 7, rather than 3, a great convenience that matches the voicemail system that I used in a job I had from 1998-2000 and thus will be much easier to remember six years ago. Oh, and since my old password contained the number 7, until I realized that I didn’t need to enter my password to get into the system I was deleting voicemails. So who knows what I missed!

At least I think that’s the new functionality with which Cingular has provided me; I’ve only had my new voicemail for a few days. For about a week and a half Cingular sent me messages telling me my voicemail upgrade was delayed. To me, the messages sounded like: “The change of your existing system to a new system with unspecified new features and, likely, no useful new features, has been delayed for an arbitrary amount of time, perhaps because we suck at planning. We’ll keep bothering you about this change that was not requested by you and which may not meet any of your product or feature needs, and which requires no action by you,until this change has been made, most likely on a timeline that is convenient to us but, yet, entirely unpredictable to us.”

Oh well, at the very least, when Cingular upgraded my voicemail system they deleted all of my old saved messages and my old outgoing message, so I both lost any formerly-useful information and sounded like an idiot to everyone who tried to call me during that time period.

Thanks, Cingular, and thanks, friends, for calling me incessantly and only during class. I love you both, but please try to take my needs into account when trying to communicate with me.

Kisses!

4 Comments

Heh. This is almost as funny as The People with the Bags. (Speaking of, when Xta and I flew home from Seattle, there were a bunch of those oversized bags, and we had to hunt around to store our normal-sized bags in bins other than the one directly above our seats. Argh! Now that I’ve thought of this, I will write a complaint to Alaska Airlines. Which they will promptly redirect to the Bit Bucket.)

By the way, I hate to say this, since I think I was the one who suggested hacking things to include your linkblog in the RSS feed — but you post enough links that you’re now eating up a disproportionate part of my f-list real estate. Possibly keeping a separate RSS feed would’ve been more user-friendly… or at least more convenient for me… :-/

Hmm, I’ll see what I can do; I kind of like having that info in the feed. Is it that I have a single large block of entries that takes up too much space, or do I have a bunch of individual entries that each take up too much space?

A little of both — you seem to post several links all at once, but also it’s just the fact that the f-page displays a maximum of 50 recent entries, and if you’ve posted 10-12 entries in a day…

Perhaps whatever script is responsible for pushing link entries to the feed could be changed so that it runs as a cron job, and just creates a “new links!” entry once a day, rather than every time a link is added.

Unfortunately MT doesn’t directly support something like that, but I’ll look into consolidating the linkblog posts some.

The problem isn’t so much that I make so many link posts on average — I think my average is 2-4/day — but rather that I tend to post either 10 or 0. That is a little inconvenient for your friends page. I’ll plug away on it a bit this weekend.