Voice Mail

my second day in new york and i got a mobile connection and free handset. the thing it prompted me to do was to set my personal greeting. some thing new for me i was quite uncomfortable with the whole thing. i hated it. tried mybest to delete the voice mail system but no avail.

anyways few days passed by, family and friends who called me from india and if the call happened to reach voicemail, got irritated. those who left voice mails also got irritated since i never checked the voice mails. i hated it because i dint know how to check and dint bother to learn either. it was only after 6 months of inactivity in this area, that one day only by chance i decided to set my personal greeting.

i hated my voice-mail box of the work phone too. guess how many voice mails i received everyday? 25-30 and this was inspite of my best efforts to pick up as many calls as possible. i have reached the record of 107 voice mails also..that was after i came back from a vacation of 2 weeks.the position improved when i changed my personal greeting to something which indirectly meant - dont u dare leave a voice mail.i also made a policy of returning the calls if 1)there was more than one voice mail of the same person 2) word urgent was used 3) there was desperation in the voice.

when i was transferred from that position, my first reaction was thank god no more voice-mails and the first thing i did was to replace my personal greeting with that of the new incumbent, and i knew that more than half of the handing over of charge was over.

many people here say i have a beautiful voice. many customers have said that too...some have even left voice-mails saying that. these are the only kinds of voice-mails i do not hate.infact ever since school days lot many people have said that i must be a good singer...anyways voice and knowledge of swaras are two different things.

recently i have been outsourcing my voice to record personal greetings of other colleagues. i have done it for three people already and am getting more offers.not bad..hmmm...voice mail is not such a bad thing after all. i like it now.i realise there is scope for lot of creativity here. e.g. my present greeting on my cell... more than 50% of the voice mails i get request me to change my greeting, they find it funny and absurd. well one can even download funny voice mail greetings from various sites.i hope the voice-mail becames a fad in india too, else i am really going to miss it when i go back.