Multi-tasking in the Silicon Valley is as unusual as breathing. Texting and driving, emailing and chatting on the phone, multiple chats, reading email during a meeting, the list goes on and on. As a denizen of the valley, I’ve a moderate case of this illness. I started my day remembering that I had not provided the answer to a question that I was asked last Wednesday. A part of my brain realized that if the person had not pinged me again for an answer, the answer was probably not that important. But, as I have written before, a part of me starts reacting even as another part cooly meditates on my reactions.

A few phone calls later, the problem was discovered to not be a problem after all. I wanted to be done with this issue before I forgot about it. I started the last phone call of the matter as I walked to my first meeting. The call went to the answering machine by the time I got to the conference room. I had a simple message: “Ian, it’s not a problem”. But I had to wait for about 30 seconds or so while I heard the insanely long “If you wish to leave a message….” instruction that I’ve heard several times before. I wondered, with the entire room staring at me, if there was a way to bypass the message. I also wondered if this was a way for the cellphone providers to make easy money.

And tonight I ran into this article by David Pogue on NYT, State of the Art – Cellphone Gripes Worthy of Congress’s Time – NYTimes.com. And in it I found that the author had a similar gripe about those insanely long instructions to leave a voicemail and access voicemail. He also answered my question of the benefit of these instructions to cellphone carriers. Here is what he had to say:

“Is this really so evil? Is 15 seconds here and there that big a deal? Well, Verizon has 70 million customers. If each customer leaves one message and checks voicemail once a day, Verizon rakes in — are you sitting down? — $850 million a year. That’s right: $850 million, just from making us sit through those 15-second airtime-eating instructions.And that’s just Verizon. Where’s the outrage, people?”

850 million dollars a year ! And just one carrier !

The rest of the gripes listed in the article are worth a read. And now with all my pent-up rage over the evil cellphone corporations, I can’t sleep. Sigh.