On behalf of everyone who has ever called anyone on a cell phone, I want to cheerfully propose a class-action law suit.
When you call a cell phone and there's no answer, I don't need to remind you that you'll be greeted with a happy robot voice saying, "The person you are calling is not available. At the tone, please record your message. When you are finished, you may hang up, or, press 1 for more options."
Have you EVER pressed 1 for more options? What are those options, and how often, if ever, will you need to hear them? More important, have you ever added up the time you've spent waiting for this message to finish?
I've tried to disable it on my own cell phone. Can't be done. I called my phone company whose name begins with a V, and begged for a techie's help. The techies can't/won't do it. Then they merrily asked me if they had handled all my support needs.
So I'm suggesting a class-action suit, on behalf of every cell phone user in America. We've been paying a tax of our time, and I've reached the point where I think we should be compensated.
If we win, what damages will we seek? Let's be reasonable, extremely so. Let's say that your time and mine should be compensated at the average minimum wage, $5.70 per hour (higher in most states, lower or absent in others).
And now, fun with math:
That robot spiel takes about ten seconds to listen to before we hear that long-awaited beep. Most users hear that message, conservatively, three times a day. There are over 200 million cell phone subscribers in America. Let's keep being very conservative and say that half of them don't use their phones on any given day. So 100 million subscribers have to wait through a wholly unnecessary ten-second message, three times a day, before we can go about our business. That's 3 billion total seconds per day. Divide that number by 60 and that's 50 million minutes a day that we're listening to that message. Divide by 60 again, and that's 833,333 hours. Which is over 95 years. Every day, we collectively spend 95 years of time waiting through a message we don't need to hear.
And we can't get rid of that message, not without the help of the phone companies.
So -- 833,333 hours of Americans' time, every day, multiplied by $5.70 per hour. If we win our suit and are awarded damages at the minimum wage, the phone companies would owe us $4,750,000 a day. For a year, the price tag is more than $1.7 billion dollars. And keep in mind that many of us are paid above minimum wage. So $1.7 billion is a reasonable sum.
I suspect that a lawyer suggested this outgoing message in the first place, no doubt to avoid some imagined, worst-case scenario lawsuit.
So if any lawyers are reading this, please get in touch with me (and if I don't answer, please be patient and leave me a message.) Let's sue for $1.7 billion for the past year of lost productivity, on behalf of all American cell users. If the phone companies agree to allow each user to disable this message, we'll agree not to sue retroactively.
In an age when the user is increasingly in charge of digital content, let's return the outgoing message exclusively to the user. I'm sure we'll think of something good to do with that $1.7 billion. Maybe a college fund for Brad and Angelina's kids.