33 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981Copyright © 2014 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.The Telecom Digest for Dec 23, 2014
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| I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth or shapes it into a garment will starve in the process. - Benjamin Harrison |
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| Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 12:16:54 -0800 (PST) From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Coca Cola says life is better without voicemail Message-ID: <c8c45e8a-b5aa-4b23-961e-6b56d45f9ea0@googlegroups.com> CBS News reported that "Coca-Cola (KO) has offered employees the option to turn off their voice mail, the company told CBS MoneyWatch in a statement. The world's largest soft-drink maker has become one of the biggest corporations to cut off voice mail for employees who opted out. Not surprisingly, most employees jumped at the chance to turn off the function. " full article at: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/coca-cola-says-life-is-better-without-voice-mail/ |
| Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 23:34:08 -0500 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Coca Cola says life is better without voicemail Message-ID: <20141223043408.GA29721@telecom.csail.mit.edu> On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 12:16:54PM -0800, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote: > CBS News reported that "Coca-Cola (KO) has offered employees the option to > turn off their voice mail, the company told CBS MoneyWatch in a statement. The > world's largest soft-drink maker has become one of the biggest corporations to > cut off voice mail for employees who opted out. Not surprisingly, most > employees jumped at the chance to turn off the function. " <RANT> Of all the inventions of the Twentieth century, I have often thought that the answering machine was the worst. It is only after a thirty-plus year trial that Coca-Cola and other companies are realizing that voice mail is a colossal waste of time: an invitation to strangers to impose unwanted obligations, unproductive suggestions, selfish demands, and foolish expectations on someone else's employees, at someone else's expense. Home users, in like manner, have grown weary of the self-imposed obligation to allow salesmen, relatives, neighborhood busybodies, and plain-old losers to siphon away their time without their consent. It used to be that ordinary people had the option of managing their own telephone usage - with tricks as common as placing a phone inside the oven to gain some peace and quiet. Then, along with CLASS features and blue-box protection, the ESS delivered the "convenience" of being able to find out exactly who was calling us when we weren't willing to be bothered, and of accepting the quid-pro-quo that we knew they expected us to return the marker. The phone companies loved it, and priced it accordingly: busy hour completion rates went from less than forty percent to over eighty in less than fifteen years. Not only did the phone company rake in Billions by charging for a service which saved them money, they also managed to alter common people's perception of what is normal and appropriate, like Coca-Cola's prophetic Christmas marketing campaign, which changed Santa Claus' seasonal suit from brown leather to sugar-sweet-buy-it-now-bright-red. I am no exception: having accepted Google's free long-distance, I'm obligated to endure email messages which contain recordings of whomever has decided that their time is more important than mine. The most common message I receive is a repeat of the shopworn "Tag, you're it" that we all learned to think was funny when the Tall White Guy [tm] on the TV told us it was going to make our lives smell lemony fresh. It smells, to be sure, but not of lemmons: voice mail is, instead, a sickly-sour-note in the stench of our oh-so-modern home lives; a reminder that we are not in charge of our own time or our own destiny, and that such antedeluvian luxuries as "quiet enjoyment" are now reserved for the rich. How, I wonder, did the Tall White Guy [tm] slip that one by us? Bill </RANT> Copyright (C) 2014 E.W. Horne. All Rights Reserved. -- Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my address to write to me directly) |
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