A message on how to get your message across

As a 40-year-old man I am naturally frustrated about a lot of things in life.

There is my ever slowly declining physical prowess, a waistline focussed on pushing out its border and the gnawing sensation I am fast running out of time to achieve the things I said I would achieve in my 20s and see 20-year-olds achieving now.

I could bury these frustrations through the purchase of a fast car or acquiring an entirely new wardrobe and style outlook or by signing up to a boxing charity match and making another 40-year-old man bleed.

But they would be temporary solutions and not being able to drive fast, have the right clothes to look 10 years younger or being ignorant as to how to efficiently punch another man in the head are not frustrations that keep me awake at night. For long.

Whether it’s because I have generally stripped my ambition of the feathers to make it fly or am truly pathetic, I think the answer for my mid-life anxiety lies in the dealing with telephone voicemail.

It is my mission to see it made criminal, or, at least made socially abhorrent, and if I can do that it will be just about enough to make me think I’ve done something that’s going to make this world a better place.

I’ve got no problem with technology in general or the specific voicemail technology that causes my frustrations. It is indeed quite amazing.

That someone can call my phone and leave their voice on it for me to listen to at another time is surely the stuff of science fiction.

They aren’t even on the phone but I can hear their voice. We’ve generally forgotten how amazing that is.

But it’s also exceptionally rude and that’s why I can’t stand it.

To my way of thinking, when a person commits to making a call to you, they are the ones who have made a choice to try and talk with you. If you are not there the right and proper thing to do is hang up and try again later.

That many people will not accept this, will believe they are too important to waste their time again and so will instead leave a voice mail message that now requires you to invest time in listening to it and acting upon it sticks in my craw (whatever a craw is) like a broken chicken bone.

To put it another way it makes me furious (genuinely) that they have transferred the responsibility of their phone call to me without my permission.

They have, in a nutshell, turned me into their slave. I must now run after them.

As if losing at a power play like this is not enough of a kick in the teeth to you personal self worth, accessing these voicemails is no easy feat and will leave you longing for the days humans communicated in smoke or drumbeat.

First you must dial the special voicemail number that you have never known and will only find by calling your service provider’s help desk and going on hold for 45 minutes.

Once you got through to that part you must hit a specific and highly non-intuitive number to listen to the message.

You will not get this number the first time and so will have to start the process again. And again.

Then if you want to hear the message one more time because they spoke too fast and mumbled you have to choose another number.

But I have never found out what that number was because the number I guess is almost always the number to delete the entire message.

If I somehow successfully access the message and am able to listen to it in full and understand it, this usually makes me even angrier than I already am.

This is because it was a pocket call from my father and the entire four minute recording was of his keys jangling in his pocket while he tried to find his ball in the rough on the 18th hole.

I have literally lost two phones in throw-down anger at voicemails and this is largely the reason I now no longer access my voicemail even if I have a number of messages demanding that they be heard.

This is my own little way to claw back some time and space in a world of technology that increasingly insinuates itself into every corner of our lives, inundating us with information, information, information.

Or it could be that I created this explanation because I’m too busy to bother with your message and, anyway, it’s too hard to access with these damn boxing gloves on.