Real letters from real geeks

Dear XYZ Mobile,

I cannot remember not hating anything about your vile corporation. I have never been a voluntary customer of yours, expect where your abominable monopoly makes this impossible, and in those cases I do so only begrudgingly with a deep-rooted sense of enmity, hatred and rage.

I would be content to eschew any contact with your crummy outfit for the rest of my days, but now I am forced to write to you. You see, at work I must call XYZ subscribers fairly regularly, and thus must endure on an almost daily basis your company's staggering shittiness.

As you may know, when one calls a mobile subscriber who is not able to answer his or her phone, one is redirected to voicemail, and usually confronted with a message like this,

"Hi, you've reached the voicemail of Harvey Kornbluth, please leave me a message and I'll call you right back."

and this is typically followed by a short tone.

Not so for your subscribers.

XYZ has deemed it necessary to append another message before the tone, as if you do not trust your own subscribers to instruct callers appropriately. This message states:

Please leave a message after the tone. When you are finished recording you may hang up or press pound for more options. If you would like to leave a call back number where you can be reached, press star.

Un-fucking-necessary.

It truly shocks me that anyone at your corporation could have decided that this was appropriate, and it angers me that there are not enough other people at your corporation to seek out and impale the masterminds behind this bullshit.

Look: enough time has passed since the invention of the answering machine that most people know what the purpose of that characteristic beep at the end of the-recorded-message-that-follows-a-lot-of-unanswered-rings is. And to remind me that I may hang up after I have finished recording is, simply put, fucking retarded.

For the handful of people that aren't up-to-date on answering machine technology, they are likely to drop dead of arrhythmia any day now. Can we lose this message? I have other calls to make.

Please stop wasting my time accommodating these ancients from another age. It's the twenty-first fucking century already.

Keep up the otherwise shitty work,

Harvey