Coca-Cola disconnects voicemail for employees

You’ve probably been guilty of it, and you’ve probably been annoyed by the practice: leaving longwinded voice mails.

You know the genre. The uncertain greeting. (“Uh, hi.”) The explanation of something the caller couldn’t possibly know. (“You’re probably out at lunch [or in a meeting or on the phone].”) The three-minute monologue before the caller bothers to rocket through an unintelligible call-back number.

Even if you haven’t experienced this, somebody in a corner office at Coca-Cola evidently has. The world’s largest beverage bottler has shut down voicemail “to simplify the way we work and increase productivity,” according to an internal memo quoted by Bloomberg.

“Landline voicemail is increasingly redundant now that smartphones are ubiquitous and texting is as routine as talking,” Bloomberg reports.

Schizophrenic oldsters

Bloomberg quotes a professor type who says that “people north of 40 are schizophrenic about voicemail,” whatever that means. On the other hand, “People under 35 scarcely ever use it,” the boffin says.