Monty by Jim Meddick for September 20, 2022

The full Monty

Text to voice on the Internet works great.

If I could, I would hire James Earl Jones to record my greeting.

Don’t give up!

No need to impress the telemarketers.

…if you leave your name and bank account number. I’ll get you.

I use the one that came with the phone.

Mine just instructs the caller to recite their phone number slowly and carefully if they want a call back. Folks will leave slow, long winded messages and then zip thru their phone number at the end. Have to replay whole voicemail multiple times to get the phone number. Recite your phone number twice and say it S L O W!

Let the robot leave the message. They’re all robocalls anyway. :)

My smartphone tells me if the incoming call is somebody already in my address book. If it’s not, I let it go. If it’s a real person who really needs to talk to me, they can leave me a voice mail, and I’ll get back to them. My wife is way beyond even that. She relies almost exclusively on text messaging.

An additional benefit of asynchronous communication is that you can deal with multiple interlocutors in batch mode, which is quite a challenge over the phone.

This is gonna take him all week, isn’t it? :)

I would really like my message to say “The number you have reached has been disconnected. Hang up and don’t try again.” Unfortunately, there may be real emergencies that wouldn’t get through.

As would I.

If he was still with us, Christopher Lee.

Or Vincent Price.

One of our friends has the message, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, so leave a message at the beep.”

For all that’s holy, E.B., buzz off! Let Monty get this wretched obsession out of his system. Let him finish, for all our sakes…..