“Please don’t leave a message after the tone.”

This is exactly how I feel:

It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.

I hate voicemail.  I especially hate emailing people and having them phone me back instead: “Hi, I got your email and am calling…”  Come on.

People like to complain about spam on email, but for me the phone is the ultimate source of unsolicited communication.  There are a few people I’ll use the phone to talk to, but if it weren’t for them, I’d dump the technology completely.