We still have a land line at home. I’m not sure why, really. We use it to make some calls (the vet, the pharmacy), and our parents use it to reach us sometimes, but they use our cell phones at least as often as the land line. We mostly ignore it because despite registering for every Do Not Call list out there, we get tons of telemarketers, political robocalls, and other spam. We talked about getting rid of it not too long ago, but I think our main reason for keeping it is because it’s our primary contact number for every bill, every account, every everything, and it would be a pain to update those. Not the greatest reason to keep paying for it. It’s Vonage, so it’s cheap, but still.
As long as we still have it, though, I get some entertainment out of its visual voicemail feature. All voicemail goes to my Yahoo account (another dinosaur, but I have better reasons for keeping it), but Vonage doesn’t always do a good job of transcribing what was actually said. Sometimes the program gives up altogether, but usually it tries. Just about half an hour ago, I got this visual voicemail:
“Hi Ms. Bird, this is Sharon calling from pointless mom. Just calling to let you know that your contacts are ready for pick up. Thank you”
That’s Vonage’s punctuation, not mine, and this is better than most since at least the second half makes sense. It’s also only the second half that told me it was my eye doctor’s office calling. I might suggest they change the name of their practice to Pointless Mom when I swing by tomorrow. Much funnier. I don’t know where that came from, though. It doesn’t even rhyme with the actual name. Speaking of names, no names had to be changed to protect the innocent – Bird is not my last name, and Sharon is not the name of the woman who called. (I listened to the actual voicemail, too.)
None of this is convincing me to keep a land line for the house, but it has convinced me that I don’t have to worry about evil robotic overlords just yet. Or maybe they just want me to think that…
