New Voicemail Greeting

[canyonwalker]

It occurred to me today I needed to change my voicemail greeting. Some actually left me a message and joked about the fact my greeting says it's 2022 when it's already 2023. Yes, I foolishly included the year in my outgoing message. It was:

Hi, this is Canyon Walker, and you've reached my voicemail. Since it's 2022 I assume you know what to do next....

Yeah, it was kind of a mistake to include the year in the message. That means I have to change it every 12 months! ...And I have been changing it every 12 months, as I've been using greetings like this for several years now.

So today I rerecorded my greeting. This time I took out the reference to the year.

Hi, this is Canyon Walker, and you've reached my— Wait, you know what? We've had voicemail for, like, thirty years now. I think you know what to do next.

Now I can go a few years before changing my message. 🤣

Comments

[sorcyress]

Hi it's Canyon Walker! Did you know the term "voice mail" was coined in 1980? Anyways, that probably means you know how to handle it!"

[canyonwalker]

That's a good one! I said 30 years referring to how long the technology has been commonplace. Its commercial availability is almost always years before that, and its design even further back. For example, the first patent application for a mobile phone was filed in 1917!

[khedron]

Nice. I wouldn't do it for the in-flight "here's how you buckle a seat belt" announcement because if someone genuinely doesn't know/has forgotten, they need to know how to do that. But voicemail? Go to town.

[canyonwalker]

The airline seatbelt announcement made sense when I was a kid. Back then a lot of people legitimately didn't know how to use seatbelts because most people never wore them. Now seatbelt use in cars has been the law for children and adults for decades. Airlines have to keep the announcement, though, because it's written in federal regulations, which are notoriously slow to change. Several years ago one airline I was on, I think it might have been Virgin Air, poked fun at that in their recorded preflight announcement. "For the 0.001% of you who've never flown or been in a car before, you can fasten your seat belt by...."