• WHAT: A way to save time, frustration and cell phone minutes
• WHY: Who wants to waste time or pay the carriers when you can easily bypass the system?
• COST: Zero - in fact, saves money for you and the people you call

I've spent a pretty good portion of my life working on things that involve standards.  When I was CEO of the WAP Forum, for example, I traipsed around the world espousing the benefits of a standard that everyone would adhere to ultimately making it easier for people to access the Internet from their wireless devices.  (Despite the bad rap that WAP - the Wireless Application Protocol - had for a while, it has served the industry well and provided a foundation for thousands of developers to help deliver content to cell phones around the world.)  Think about standards for a simple thing like putting gas in your car - how cumbersome would it be if you need different gas stations for different brands of cars?  Fords would need their own gas station, Chevys their own, BMWs their own, and so on.  Not very conducive for creating a large market for cars in that scenario, is it?

Well, thankfully, there are standards in most things and we benefit from them every day.  You can plug any kind of lamp, appliance, computer, recharger or anything else into a standard electrical outlet, for example, and they all work.  The one place that standards don't seem to apply - and that drives me completely nuts - is in the world of voicemail.

Have you noticed that hardly any two voicemail systems work with the same key combinations?  Some require you to press "3" to delete a message, some "7."  Some want you to press "9" to save a message, others "3."  Some let you delete a message before it plays completely through and others force you to fast-forward (using, of course, varying key combinations) before you can delete it.  It's a shortcut-lovers nightmare and is designed, I'm convinced, to trap people into a comfort zone that makes changing their system undesirable. 

This is particularly true of cell phone voice mail.  All the systems work differently - Sprint uses different codes than Verizon, who uses different codes than AT&T, who uses different codes than T-Mobile.  And the single most annoying part of these keystroke differences is the key required to skip immediately to the beep so that you can just leave a message instead of hearing someone's life story.  

Now, don't get me wrong.  I like hearing your voice instead of the robotic "You have reached the cell phone voicemail for 818.555.1212. Leave a message at the tone."  What I don't like is being forced to listen to the same thing over and over again every time I get your voice mail.  So I've done some investigating and have some tips and ideas for you if you're as neurotic as I am about these things. 

The very first tip applies to all cell phone carriers:  Do you really need to leave a voice mail at all??  At this point everyone knows that if they're phone is on and someone tries to call them without the phone being answered the "1 Missed Call" message appears on the screen and you can easily see who called.  So why would anyone ever leave a message saying "Oh, hi, this is Scott.  Please call me at 818.555.1212.  Thanks."?  This means that I have to spend time checking my voice mail, waste my cell phone minutes and take more time listening to a message that's telling me the same thing that I already know from the missed call list.  Please, if you're calling me and you get my voice mail - just ignore it and hang up.  I promise you'll get a call back from me.   

Now that we've got my pet peeve out of the way, how do you "cut to the chase" (an old Hollywood term for getting to the most exciting part of the movie, or, more metaphorically, getting to the thing you want to see or hear most - very appropriate in this case) when you get someone's voice mail on their cell phone?  It's pretty simple, actually... like a lot of things in life you just need to know what buttons to press.  

Below are the codes that will skip all of the other pre-beep foo-rah and get you right to the point where you can leave your message.  If you know some people who have phones from these carriers try this the next time you get their voicemail - once you have you'll never wait for their entire message again.  If you've got other tips, corrections or additions, let me know.  

• AT&T/Cingular - Press "1" (or "#", but I prefer "1" because it's consistent with many others) during the outgoing message (the part where the person you've called tells you to leave a message) to jump right to the beep.
• Verizon - Press "1" (or "*") to skip to the beep.
• Sprint - Press "1" to skip to the beep.
• T-Mobile - Press "#" to skip to the beep. 
  

Finally, do your friends and business associates a favor - make your outgoing message brief and to the point.  It shouldn't have to be any longer than five seconds.  If it is, I suggest the following type of message:

"Hello.  This is Scott Goldman.  Press "1" at any time to jump directly to the beep.... Then blah blah blah..."  

That way you've given people an exit strategy - they can listen to rest of your message, sales pitch, favorite song, children singing happy birthday to you or whatever - or choose to just do what they probably want to do, which is to just leave a message and hang up.