Into The Depths Of Voice Mail If You Can’T Get Over Its Impersonal Style, Press The Pound Key. But Voice Mail Also Has Its Fans, Who Prefer The Ease Of Conveying Information Without Having To Speak With A Human Being.

Does this sound familiar?

You rush back to your desk after lunch, hoping that Mr. Smith returned your call.

Your message light is flashing, but after listening patiently to all three messages (having to replay two to get the phone numbers), none of them is Mr. Smith.

You delete your messages and hang up. But your message light is still on. You check again. Mr. Smith called while you were dealing with your other voice mail messages. He’s heading out of town for the weekend and he’ll call back Monday.

Or how about this scenario?

You desperately need to get Ms. Jones on the phone. She’s not there, but her message says if it’s urgent, dial 112 to get her assistant on the phone. So you hit 112…and get the assistant’s voice-mail message.

Did you ever call the company that lists its voice mail prompts in non-numerical order? (“For Alice, dial one. For Bill, dial three. For Carol, dial two…”). Or the state agency that insists on giving all nine of its voice-mail prompts in Spanish before it gets to them in English, instead of giving Spanish-speakers their own list?

Nothing, it seems, can inspire an anti-technology rant as quickly as the black hole of voice mail.

We may hate sitting in traffic, but it’s hard to argue the use of a car. It’s disastrous when a computer crashes, but a ledger book never provided anyone with up-to-the-minute market results.

But what was so wrong with the receptionist and those pink, “While-you-were-out” slips that we needed to replace them with “phone tag” and * and #?

Plenty, says Terry Sticka, area manger for Touch America, which installs voice-mail systems.

Despite the flaws, voice mail is vastly more efficient than leaving messages, Sticka said.

“It’s a tool like any other, and if you use it appropriately, it can be very valuable,” Sticka said.

The biggest advantage to voice mail, he said, is the ability to convey specific information without actually having to talk to someone.

“It’s a case of being able to carry on business in a nonreal-time kind of way,” he said. “I’ve had many conversations that are not real-time conversations.”

Peter Mayer, a Spokane telecommunications consultant, is such a believer in voice mail that he sometimes objects when a real person answers the phone.

“They’ll start asking me about my name and I’m thinking, `I don’t want to get into all this,”’ Mayer said. “It’s almost inconsiderate.”

Libby Barnes, marketing director for the Spokane Area Chamber of Commerce, said voice mail is “a blessing and a concern.”

“It enables us to communicate in ways that are more efficient, but it takes time from other things we need to get done,” she said. “If people are able to reach you and leave you a message, you are obligated to get back to them in a timely manner.”

Answering your messages is one of the protocols that voice-mail users need to follow, said Mayer. If you leave too many messages unreturned, you’ll stop getting any messages at all, he said. Like letter writing and e-mail, voice mail has its own etiquette that should be obeyed, Sticka and Mayer agreed.

Sticka recommends updating your greeting daily, as one of the first things you do at work.

“It’s like getting a cup of coffee,” he said. “If you hear the same greeting from the same person day after day, month after month, they don’t know if they’re there or not. You could be on vacation.”

It’s critical that message systems be set up properly, Mayer said, so callers can’t get lost and calls always default to a real person, at least somewhere.

And if you record a greeting, it should probably be in your own voice, Mayer said. Having a secretary or assistant’s voice on your message reeks of arrogance, he said.

Barnes agrees.

“When people have someone’s direct line, you expect to hear their voice,” she said. “Personally, I get a little annoyed.”

Of course, living in a world where we communicate in “nonreal time” means we actually talk to each other less. While some may mourn the loss of person-to-person contact, Mayer does not.

Less talk, he said, is more efficient. And if you need to have a conversation, well, voice mail can help there as well.

“If you want to talk to someone, you can leave a time when they can get back to you,” Mayer said.