Ditch your voicemail. Get an answering machine.
Apropos of nothing, here’s a money-saving tip: Get rid of your voicemail.
A few years ago I cancelled our call waiting and voicemail, and disabled call waiting on my mobile. Call waiting is really rude. When you answer call waiting, what you’re saying is this: I have no idea who is calling me, but I think there’s a decent chance that I’d rather be talking to that person. Every time my call waiting would beep, I’d think gee, I wish there were some way of indicating to the person calling that I’m talking right now. It eventually dawned on me that there is such a system, and it’s the busy signal.
But it’s the voicemail that I’m really happy with. We were paying Centel Sprint Embarq CenturyTel CenturyLink something like $8/month for voicemail. That doesn’t seem like much, but I’m sure I can put $96/year to better use. So, instead, we bought an answering machine. They’re cheap. Ours was something like $25. (Here’s one for $16.88.) We can check messages remotely, and it doubles as a method of calling the house during bad weather to find out if we have electricity. That puppy paid for itself in three months.
Ditch call waiting because it’s rude. Ditch voicemail because it’s expensive.
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