Michael Eakes

Working for Rojo has been an excellent experience for me. In my time there, I have architected and built massive news aggregation systems, feed readers, AJAX components, and social networks. I also lovingly crafted large-scale, distributed data designs for these systems. I have learned a lot from all of the talented people that I worked with.

Recently I put in my two-weeks notice and finished up my work at Rojo. After two Web-2.0-paced years of cranking out a personalized, relevant news system, I’m looking forward to exploring some new challenges. Next, I will be going back into independent software consulting. I am a get-anything-done generalist of course, but I will be specializing in web 2.0 architecture, data design, and scalability.

Are you like me?

Have you figured out that after you hear the person you’ve called say, “I can’t answer the phone right now…” that little beep signifies your big chance to leave a message?

Does it displease you that an icy-cold computer-woman* takes up 50 seconds of your life explaining how to leave a voicemail:

To leave a voice message, press 1, or just wait for the tone. To send a numeric page, press 2 now. [long torturous pause] At the tone, please record your voice message. When you are finished recording, you may hang up or press 1 for more options. [another fake-out pause]

Since I wouldn’t want anyone calling me to waste time hearing those unnecessary instructions, I’ve done my own small part to disable them.

Here’s how you can too: (Sprint PCS customers)

Press and hold “1″ to get into voicemail. Once you’re at the “main menu”, press the following digits slowly and sequentially:

3 3 1 3 2 *

It is best if you use the above sequence as a menu guide, listening at each step for any changes that may have occurred in the menu system since this post was written.

I would love to see comments shared by anyone who figures out how to disable outgoing voicemail instructions in other networks besides Sprint. Since we’re going to have robots milling about everywhere, let’s at least have them be subtle.

*No offense meant if you happen to be the voice actor who recorded those instructions.