Update on Pogue’s ‘Take Back the Beep’ Campaign

David Pogue, on his campaign to get U.S. mobile phone carriers to eliminate the 15-second recorded instructions you hear when leaving a voicemail message:

Verizon’s PR contact, Tom Pica, hasn’t responded to my request for a progress report. He’s probably still irritated at me. When ABC News interviewed him about this campaign, he told them that customers can already turn off the instructions. Which isn’t true. So that night on Twitter, I said that he was lying.

He called me to let me know that he wasn’t lying — he was misquoted. What he said was that you can turn off voicemail altogether if you don’t like the 15-second instructions.

Well, O.K., but … huh?

Isn’t that like saying, “My son bites his nails, so let’s chop off his hands”?

★ Friday, 14 August 2009