Jersey Mike

“This message is only here to cost you money.”

Everyone knows (or should know by now) that the wireless industry is more corrupt than a meeting of bosses in the back room of a deli in Jersey City.

They use absurdly deceptive marketing techniques and require a ridiculous commitment that costs more to break that an online divorce.

Additionally, what other industry charges you a dramatically different amount for their product depending on how long you’ve had your current model? The ads for the forty nine dollar camera phone are all, apparently, bullshit.

But all of the taxes and fees and charges, the thing that bothers me the most about using a wireless phone is the voicemail greeting.

I’m not talking about the greeting on the line of the person that you’re trying to reach. I actually kind of enjoy hearing people’s greetings. I think you can actually learn a lot about a person by their voicemail greeting.

No, folks. What I’m talking about happens immediately after the greeting of the person who can’t take your call. It takes about twelve seconds and if you do the math, you’ll see that it adds up to more money per year than you or I will most likely not see in a lifetime.

As if by the year two thousand and six we’re not smart enough to know how to leave a voicemail, we’ve got some computer generated and perfectly intonated woman explaining to us “To page this person, press five. To leave this person a voicemail, press zero or simply wait for the tone. When you are finished recording, you may hang up or press one for more options. Beep.”

It all lasts about twelve seconds. Every time. Thousands of times per day. Every day, each year.

Let’s do the math.

Let’s say you’ve got the average nine hundred minute plan with any of the big three (Verizon, Cingular and Sprint/Nextel.) That average plan comes out to about seventy bucks per month after taxes.

So regardless of the “free minutes” or “off peak” bullshit they use to justify these outlandish charges, you’re paying seventy dollars per month for nine hundred minutes.

Seventy divided by nine hundred comes out to .07.

Seven cents per minute is what that nine hundred minute plan costs you.

We need to break it down even further, so look at .07 divided by sixty (seconds in each minute) That comes out to .0012. That’s just over one tenth of a cent per second.

Next, we’re going to multiply that by one tenth of a cent by 12 (the number of seconds that stupid greeting takes)

We’re now back up to .015 cents being billed to each and every one of our accounts for each time we get someone’s voicemail.

That doesn’t seem like a lot, right?

Well, let’s start adding and multiplying.

I use an absurdly high number of minutes each month, but I’d safely estimate that the average wireless user leaves maybe three or four voicemails per day.

So for sake of numbers, we’re going to call it four. The average wireless customer leaves four voicemails per day.

Four voicemails, which comes to four sets of twelve unnecessary seconds being billed to each of our accounts at .015 cents each time we leave a message.

Five days per week (cause weekends are free, right?) is .30 cents per week.

Still doesn’t seem like much, right?

There are well over one hundred and fifty million wireless users in this country.

Each one of us is spending an additional thirty cents per week.

Thirty cents per person multiplied by one hundred and fifty million people comes to 45,000,000 each week.

Oh, and that’s dollars, by the way.

Forty five million dollars each week multiplied by fifty two weeks per year comes to 2,340,000,000.

That’s two billion three hundred forty thousand dollars.

Two billion three hundred forty thousand dollars each year is spent leaving a stupid little voicemail.

All I can really do is shake my head. Or stop leaving voicemails.