Stop sending voice messages!

Tap the microphone button and off you go – recording a minute-long monologue, enriched with «uhhh’s», «what else’s», «hmmmm’s» and «whoopsie, just dropped my pen!». In other words, filled with everything that nobody wants to hear. You hit send without second thought, and just like that, your dialogue partner is forced to listen to the whole spiel and remember the noteworthy points.

It’s annoying. And it divides our society into two groups: the voicemail senders and their victims, or those who spread their blather around the world and those condemned to listen to it. I belong to the second group. And I say enough is enough!

You’re robbing us of our time

The person who sends a voice message is cheating the person who receives the voice message of their time. Or, to look at it from another perspective, they’re shifting the time they save onto their counterparts, who are forced to listen to the message. The audacity! The cheek!

What broke the camel’s back for me, you ask? It was, in fact, one of my best friends. Just recently, she sent me 13 minutes’ worth of ramblings. 13 minutes! Even at double speed, it took me a painfully long time to listen to. And then I couldn’t even answer her, because I’d forgotten half of it anyway!

A voicemail could be a simple phone call. Or a long text message, for all I care.

Only in a very few cases are voice messages ever okay. Like when you’re on the go and need to communicate something quickly. But there’s no way chronic voice-messagers are on the go nearly enough to justify the sheer amount of audio! With that, their behaviour makes them no less than ruthless repeat offenders, repeating their heedless method of communication. And if I intervene by writing back that I don’t want voice messages? Why, they reply with – you guessed it – a voice message!

I never know when I’ll fall victim to a voice message; I’m on constant high alert. If I have headphones with me, I can at least listen to the message on the train. If I don’t and decide to listen in by holding my phone up to my ear, chances are I’ll inadvertently switch to speaker, thus airing my friends’ dirty laundry to the whole train. And nobody wants that.

No end in sight

The voicemail epidemic is getting worse, as showcased by the fact that it’s now making its way into the professional sphere. I recently sent an article to a colleague for review – and they sent me their feedback in a voice message.

I was too perplexed to protest. What I did instead is reach for a notepad and take notes. In other words, I wrote down what should have been in written form from the beginning. It took me ten minutes. The voice message was two minutes long. Ergo, it took me five times as long. This is as disrespectful as it is unnecessary.

And there’s no end in sight. Even Microsoft Teams offers voice messages.

If you absolutely must – use the dictation function!

Dear senders of voice messages, you are not podcasters! As evidenced by the fact that you don’t have a podcast. Stop sending your swill around. We – that is, we who don’t send voice messages – don’t want to receive them either.

If you really can’t help it or are too stressed to type, use the dictation function. WhatsApp itself doesn’t yet offer one, but there’s a very simple workaround: use Google or Siri to convert your speech to text. Simply tap voice input (the microphone icon) on the keyboard – et voilà. It’s really that easy.

No, you won’t be able to speak in any dialects; yes, you’ll have to stick to standard language variants. But that’s still way less effort than listening to a whole message, picking out the important bits and writing them down.

In the meantime, what’s my solution to unwieldy voice messages? I simply won’t be listening to them anymore.