Nick Glover

There were a couple articles on other blogs a little while ago about ways to bypass the lengthy voicemail intros many carriers use. You know how it goes: “‘Hi, this is Nick, leave a message after the beep.’ To leave a callback number, press 1. To send a numeric page, press 2.” The articles I read attribute this annoyance to carriers wanting to use up more of your minutes, thus costing you more money, but when you really think about it, that reason doesn’t make any sense. First, that only works with pay-as-you-go plans, which limits how much money they would actually make from it (though I imagine there are still a large number of those users). More importantly, though, is that the carrier with the long voicemail intro is not likely to make any extra money by forcing the annoyance on us. I’m on Verizon, and if I call other Verizon users, I do not use any minutes, so the long intro makes no difference. If I call someone on a different network so that I am actually using minutes, that other network does not get any extra money from me; Verizon is the one that benefits. Not everyone gets to call their own network for free, I suppose, but it seems to me that most of the money made from long intros goes to competing networks, so it would actually be in each carrier’s best interest to shorten the intros. But maybe I’m just missing something.