The Curious Autodidact

photo by Kprateek88

I heard a friend talking about David Pogue’s cell phone message crusade today and it got me interested in learning more. Writing for the NYT David Pogue claims:

“These little 15-second waits add up–big time. If Verizon’s 70 million customers leave or check messages twice a weekday, Verizon rakes in about $620 million a year. That’s your money. And your time: three hours of your time a year, just sitting there listening to the same message over and over again every year.”

His solution? Figure out how to sidestep the message and use this to record instead a message for Verizon cell phones such as: “Hi, you’ve reached Ginger, press * to leave a message” this takes the listener directly to the beep.

Here are the various codes:

* for Verizon

1 for Sprint

# for AT&T

# for T-Mobile

Now if Pogue would get people rallying behind the world hunger or the dwindling clean water supply…