Life's Annoyances, Part 1

First in a series.

Why is it that some mobile phone carriers (I'm looking at you Verizon Wireless) insist on making you listen to a 15 second spiel before you can leave a voice message? Somehow we got by for years with answering machines that said, "I'm not home right now, please leave a message after the beep...<beep>". Straightforward and efficient.

Now, after I wait for the phone to ring 12 times--just in case it's in a combination safe underneath a sofa rather than in a pocket--I spend a quarter minute of my life I'll never get back hearing again about all my wonderful choices in case I didn't actually want to just leave a message. Maybe I'd like to leave a callback number. Maybe I'd like to hear more options after I leave a message. Maybe I'd like to send electric shocks into the eyeballs of whatever moron decided that they'd make literally millions of people listen repeatedly to a message that maybe four of them will ever use. Oh, I guess that's not an option.

Sprint nicely lets you work around this by pressing 1 as soon as the prerecorded message starts. I haven't found a similar trick for Verizon. Maybe it exists, but systems like this shouldn't be designed so that only through esoteric knowledge can you make them work the way they're supposed to.