Watering new grass

BAD BAD NEWS

MESSAGE FROM BROOKS AND DUNN | 8/10/09

To Our Fans:

After 20 years of making music and riding this trail together, we have
agreed as a duo that it's time to call it a day. This ride has been
everything and more than we could ever have dreamed.... We owe it all
to you, the fans. If you hear rumors, don't believe them, it's just
time.

We will release our #1's and then some" on September 8th and bid
you farewell one last time in 2010, with The Last Rodeo Tour...(dates to be
announced).

Brooks & Dunn

Thank u Bill Clinton

Notice they did not send W.(Bush) to get the two girls! Thank goodness they r home and safe. Thank u Bill Clinton

Take Back The Beep, Part II

Wow, what a ride.

On Thursday, on this blog, in my e-mail column and on Twitter, I launched “Take Back the Beep,” a national campaign to restore your time and money from the country’s cellular carriers. I’m referring, of course, to the obnoxious, drawn-out, 15-second instructions that Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile tack on to your own voice mail greeting. You know: “To page this person, press 5. When you have finished recording, you may hang up. To leave a callback number, press 1,” etc.

The response has been amazing. Gizmodo, Engadget, Consumerist, Technologizer and other blogs joined me in the cause. Radio stations called for interviews. And above all, readers responded, flooding the carriers with such a volume of complaints, three out of the four wound up setting up special channels to accommodate it all.

Here are the latest links where you can complain:

* Verizon: Post a complaint here: http://bit.ly/FJncH.
* AT&T: Send e-mail to: customerissues@attnews.us.
* Sprint: Post a complaint here: http://bit.ly/9CmrZ
* T-Mobile: Post a complaint here: http://bit.ly/2rKy0u.

Along the way, a few interesting developments.

* In mid-afternoon yesterday, T-Mobile deleted all of the messages posted to its forums on this topic. Then it began rejecting any new posting containing the word “beep.” Finally, it created a new forum (link above) just for messages on this topic.

* About 500 of you sent me copies of your complaints. I was impressed: you guys know how to do business. You weren’t hostile or abusive — in many cases, you even acknowledged the carriers’ need to make money — but you made the case, articulately and firmly, that wasting our time is not the way to do it.

* Many of you mentioned, as I did earlier this week, that there are secret codes to bypass the obnoxious instruction messages. It’s * for Verizon, 1 for Sprint and # for T-Mobile or AT&T.

But this is not a solution. It requires you to know in advance which carrier the person you’re calling uses, which is unrealistic! Making the instructions optional would be a far superior idea.

* Many of you replied: “Well, why don’t you give out the code when you record your voice mail greeting? For example: ‘You’ve reached David Pogue. Press star to cut to the beep.’”

This is a good idea. But it’s only a patch, not a solution. Only a tiny fraction of Americans would bother to change their greetings; I’m guessing that a majority don’t even know HOW to change their greetings.

We need a more sweeping change.

* Lots of you reminded me that Sprint *already* lets you eliminate the canned instructions. Not easily, but it’s doable: Access your voice mail box. Press 3, for personal options.
 Press 2, for greetings.
 Press 1, to change your personal greeting.
 Press 3, to add or remove the caller instructions. Follow the prompts to turn instructions on or off.

(How strange that Sprint’s P.R. people, who knew of my crusade in advance, didn’t mention this fact! Maybe even they didn’t know you can turn off the instructions.)

* Apparently, the iPhone doesn’t present the instructions, either. Apple negotiated a special arrangement with AT&T to eliminate them.

* Verizon customer-service reps, to their immense credit, have been e-mailing each customer back, one at a time, to explain that “Verizon Wireless has this instructional message in place to ensure that callers who are not familiar with our voice mail system leave a message correctly.“

Nice of them to write back, but totally bogus reasoning. What’s on our greetings should be OUR decision, not Verizon’s. Furthermore, if there’s anyone left in America that doesn’t know how to leave a message at the beep, then they shouldn’t be allowed to use telephones.

All right then: will all of this work? Will there be any change?

I can’t say. I will say, however, that all four carriers explicitly said that they intend to monitor the situation. “We definitely want to hear from customers on this,” wrote AT&T’s Mark Siegel to me (yes, even after customers completely swamped his e-mail with complaints).

In the end, the craziness of mass participation will die away, and maybe that’s what the carriers are hoping for. But I’m also hopeful that, with the stupidity of these instruction messages brought to the public consciousness, customers will be reminded how irksome it is every time they leave a message — that it’ll bug them from now on — that it will become a canker that won’t go away until the carriers make it so.

Take Back The Beep

You all should read this and TAKE ACTION!!

Take Back The Beep

Over the past week, in The New York Times and on my blog, I’ve been ranting about one particularly blatant money-grab by American cellphone carriers: the mandatory 15-second voicemail instructions.
Suppose you call my cell to leave me a message. First you hear my own voice: “Hi, it’s David Pogue. Leave a message, and I’ll get back to you”–and THEN you hear a 15-second canned carrier message.
* Sprint: “[Phone number] is not available right now. Please leave a detailed message after the tone. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press pound for more options.”
* Verizon: “At the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press 1 for more options. To leave a callback number, press 5. (Beep)”
* AT&T: “To page this person, press five now. At the tone, please record your message. When you are finished, you may hang up, or press one for more options.”
* T-Mobile: “Record your message after the tone. To send a numeric page, press five. When you are finished recording, hang up, or for delivery options, press pound.”
(You hear a similar message when you call in to hear your own messages. “You. Have. 15. Messages. To listen to your messages, press 1.” WHY ELSE WOULD I BE CALLING?)

I, the voicemailbox owner, cannot turn off this additional greeting message. You, the caller, can bypass it, but only if you know the secret keypress–and it’s different for each carrier. So you’d have to know which cellphone carrier I use, and that of every person you’ll ever call; in other words, this trick is no solution.

These messages are outrageous for two reasons. First, they waste your time. Good heavens: it’s 2009. WE KNOW WHAT TO DO AT THE BEEP.
Do we really need to be told to hang up when we’re finished!? Would anyone, ever, want to “send a numeric page?” Who still carries a pager, for heaven’s sake? Or what about “leave a callback number?” We can SEE the callback number right on our phones!
Second, we’re PAYING for these messages. These little 15-second waits add up–bigtime. If Verizon’s 70 million customers leave or check messages twice a weekday, Verizon rakes in about $620 million a year. That’s your money. And your time: three hours of your time a year, just sitting there listening to the same message over and over again every year.
In 2007, I spoke at an international cellular conference in Italy. The big buzzword was ARPU–Average Revenue Per User. The seminars all had titles like, “Maximizing ARPU In a Digital Age.” And yes, several attendees (cell executives) admitted to me, point-blank, that the voicemail instructions exist primarily to make you use up airtime, thereby maximizing ARPU.
Right now, the carriers continue to enjoy their billion-dollar scam only because we’re not organized enough to do anything about it. But it doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t have to sit there, waiting to leave your message, listening to a speech recorded by a third-grade teacher on Ambien.
Let’s push back, and hard. We want those time-wasting, money-leaking messages eliminated, or at least made optional.
I asked my Twitter followers for help coming up with a war cry, a slogan, to identify this campaign. They came up with some good ones:
“Where’s the Beep?”
“Let it Beep”
“We Know. Let’s Go.”
“Lose the Wait”
“My Voicemail, My Recording”
“Hell, no, we won’t hold!”
My favorite, though, is the one that sounds like a call to action: “Take Back the Beep.”
And here’s how we’re going to do it.
We’re going to descend, en masse, on our carriers. Send them a complaint, politely but firmly. Together, we’ll send them a LOT of complaints.
If enough of us make our unhappiness known, I’ll bet they’ll change.
I’ve told each of the four major carriers that they’ll be hearing from us. They’ve told us where to send the messages:
* Verizon: Post a complaint here: http://bit.ly/FJncH.
* AT&T: Send e-mail to: customerissues@attnews.us.
* Sprint: Post a complaint here: http://bit.ly/9CmrZ
* T-Mobile: Post a complaint here: http://bit.ly/2rKy0u.
Three of the four carriers are just directing us to their general Web forums. Smells like a cop-out, I know.
Yet all four carriers promise that they’ll read and consider our posts. And we have two things going for us.
First, I have a feeling that the volume of complaints will be too big for them to ignore. To that end, I hope you’ll pass these instructions along, blog them, Twitter them, and spread the word. (Gizmodo, Engadget, Consumerist and others have agreed to help out.) And I hope you’ll take the time to complain yourself. Do it now, before you forget.
Second, we’ll all be watching. I’ll be reporting on the carriers’ responses. If they ignore us, we’ll shame them. If they respond, we’ll celebrate them.
Either way, it’s time to rise up. It’s time for this crass, time-wasting money-grab to end for good.

God wants me to be blogging

You know as I sit here and think about it, I think God wants me to be blogging on this very website. Some of you out there just take some of this stuff way too seriously. Yes, I'm returning to some of the previous post.

Just the other day, one of my good friends asked me what one of my particular exs was up to. I recently found out that she had gotten back with her ex and then I told them that she had said that she knew this is where God wanted her to be.

Immediately what came out of his mouth was, "Throw in the God thing and that justifies it every time." That just happens to be exactly the way I thought about it. You know if you're doing something and you throw in the old "I think this is where God wants me to be or feel this is what God wants me to be doing," its always a very hard point to argue.

Yes, I believe in God and yes, I pray regularly. I just happen to think that it's an easy way out when people throw in, this is what God wants me to be doing for justification.