YOU SCREAM-A, I SCREAM-A

PROLOGUE: After you read this post, you’ll never want to leave me a voicemail again.  But since text messaging has largely replaced voicemails anyway, it shouldn’t be much of a loss.

SO.  I love technology.  In high school, I sat in the library drooling over the “What’s New” section of Popular Science.  I spent the equivalent of a month’s rent on a mini disc player before I could drive.  And I had one of those primitve mp3 players that could only hold like two hours of music.  At the risk of sounding like a jerk, I’ve always been what they call an early adopter.

Instead of Popular Science, I now keep up by reading Gizmodo, Engadget, TechCrunch, and various other gizmo blogs.  But my favorite, and probably the most accessible and funny tech-y blog, belongs to David Pogue, New York Times Technology columnist. And a while back he wrote about a new voicemail service called YouMail, which he explains here:

FREE FUN YouMail, also in beta testing, is also dissatisfied with traditional voice mail. Its solution, though, is a complete surgical replacement of your carrier’s voice mail system. When you sign up at youmail.com, you’re instructed to reprogram your cellphone by typing in a series of codes. When it’s over, YouMail is your voice-mail service — not your cell carrier.

Why bother? First, because you can record a separate greeting for everyone you know. Your boss will hear you say: “This is Casey Robin, systems manager at Globodyne Technology. I’ll get back to you promptly. After all — your business is our business.”

Your love interest, however, will hear: “Hey there, huggalump. Miss you. Leave me a massage.”

(Hint: Don’t mix them up.)

You can even treat certain callers to something called Ditchmail. That’s when they hear, “This user is currently not accepting new messages. Goodbye!” (Disgruntled exes come to mind.)

For everyone else, you just record a generic greeting. You can also check your messages from the Web or any phone, save memorable ones to your computer, and forward messages to other people.

The Web site is still glitchy — for starters, a fix for Macs is in the works — and switching back to your old voice mail if you don’t care for YouMail isn’t exactly a one-click operation. But over all, YouMail is fun, and it has real uses; for example, you can let your friends know that you’re away on vacation, but not people who don’t need to know.

YouMail, too, is free during its testing phase; after the new year, it will be free if you’re willing to endure ads, and a few dollars a month otherwise. Note that YouMail isn’t ideal if you have Sprint, which charges you for “conditional forwarding” — a feature that YouMail requires.

Frankly, it is worth a few dollars to escape the minutes-burning, recorded instructions of cellular voice mail systems: “To leave a message, speak at the tone. When you’re finished, you may hang up … .”

You can read the whole thing here.

So I’ve been having fun with YouMail for a couple years now.  They consistently roll out new features.  Their latest, and by many votes creepiest, innovation is called Smart Greeting, which automatically greets callers with their own name, like this, “Hello John, Josh can’t get to the phone. Please leave a message after the tone.”  Smart Greeting does this by reading whatever is on the caller id.  Apparently, the voice of the robot is a creepy woman.  I’ve never actually heard it.  But I have saved lots of responses to the robotic voicemail woman.  Girls seem to hate it, guys seem to like it.  Here are the robot woman haters:

***WARNING: IF PROFANITY ISN’T YOUR THING, DO NOT LISTEN***

“get rid of it”

“i hate that woman saying my name”

“freakiest thing ever”

“goddd”

And the robot woman lovers:

“pretty neat”

“love it”

SO.  I got curious.  I wanted to know what all the fuss was about.  I called myself.  Here is a poor recording of what robot voicemail lady sounds like:

BUT WHAT DOES THE INTERNET THINK?  I want some feedback.

Moving on.  In the pre-Smart Greeting days, I created customized greetings for different callers.  These recordings were usually of me pretending to answer the phone, and then of course, the caller would hear the beep and be completely confused.  Here are some of those responses:

“change that you mail greeting”

“dude”

“like a cobra”

“you son of a bitch”

“hilarious”

“still going bowling?”

“i actually thought that was you”

“hahaha”

AND NOW, the mother of them all.  Listen closely to the ending.

“dead to me”

Tons more where those came from.  Maybe I’ll roll out a new one at the end of each post, like The Daily Show’s “Moment of Zen”.  For fun.  Stuff like this:

ADDENDUM: YouMail likes me.