Used to be daily routine

April 20 2008

I have much to catch up on from last week.  One blast from the past happened at the Lotusphere Comes to You in Milwaukee.  One of the attendees approached me after my first session, and I thought that I had probably met him before.  It turns out that it was Chris, who was one of my first customers when I joined Lotus ~14 years ago.  How did we triangulate this?  He handed me my business card from 1994 -- when I first joined Lotus.

What was different about that business card versus today?  Everything but my name and the word "Lotus".  

Then Now
Title Associate Systems Engineer Business Unit Executive
E-mail address ed_brill@crd.lotus.com ed_brill@us.ibm.com
Company Name Lotus Development Corporation IBM Corporation
Phone Number 312-683-5810 Who cares
Website What? www.edbrill.com
Mobile Number What? +1-847-736-0638
FAX Number 312-693-5895 No longer included
Reverse side Blank Japanese translation


Chris also had one of my later cards, from 1999 or so when I was based in Westford, MA, as a Notes product manager, and to round things out, he had a card from one of my sales colleagues from back in the mid-1990s.

All these old business cards reminded me of things that were so common "back then".  It was Lotus and then IBM policy that one started each day by changing your outgoing voicemail greeting to include today's date and details about your schedule, such as when you will be able to return calls.  It was self-policing -- if you forgot to change your greeting, for sure someone would remind you amongst a myriad of voicemails.

I hate voicemail.  I think it's been eight or ten years since the daily change routine was part of my day.  And I'm better off for it.

This blast down memory lane was fun, so thanks for that, Chris!

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Lotus  Add/View Comments [10]

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  1. 1  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 4/21/2008 5:35:58 AM

    Absolutely agree, I utterly hate voice mail. It's a complete pain to login and change the message. I attribute this to two things:

    1. It has more options than you could possibly want, all of which start to blur after the voice has read out the 7th option to you.

    2. It requires an 8 digit password which seems to have expired and needs changing every time I login. It's difficult enough to remember a myriad of word-based passwords let alone numbers. Once you've been thru immediate family birthdays and can't re-use them, what then?

    If only there were some way of accessing voice mail and controlling it all from a slick integrated front-end ;o)

  1. 2  Henry Ferlauto http://www.geniusinside.com | 4/21/2008 7:43:00 AM

    Ed - You know, by some accounts Chris could be considered a stalker or at least a groupie! I would have someone make sure he doesn't have an Ed Brill t-shirts, if he does; I would continually monitor your front yard. :)

    I'll add to the "I hate voicemail" list. One would think that any of the unified messaging purveyors would use this as a way to market all the UM tools. Tapping in to that emotional frustration of using traditional voicemail coupled with some of the incredible "just make your life eaiser" features can be very powerful.

    Apple did this with their "Doug 'Mankind'" ad for the iPhone, one of the original TV commercials for the device.

    Link --> { Link }

  1. 3  Bill Geimer  | 4/21/2008 8:44:40 AM

    Comcast does at least allow me to get my voicemail from their DigitalVoice service on my computer. But other than that, I do agree. Voice mail is not as useful and usually the slowest way to get hold of me.

  1. 4  Danny Lawrence  | 4/21/2008 9:27:00 AM

    Voicemail on my cellphone is useful, if I'm in a place where I can't take the call (like when I'm driving for example!) I get a nice little VM alert, and can check it later. But yeah, voicemail on the office phone? I don't have the guts to change my message to "Hi this is Danny, If you are hearing this message I'm not in the office and you'd better call my cell if you want a prompt responce", but most people know that.

  1. 5  Mike Lazar  | 4/21/2008 10:00:26 AM

    I believe I still have a voice mail box in our "office", but it says something like, "Hi, this is Mike Lazar, I never check this number. If you want to get a hold of me, call..." On my home office line, I have the standard greeting that also says to call my mobile if you need me right away. However, I'd be lost without VM on the home office and mobile. I just get too many calls to answer them all.

  1. 6  Stuart McIntyre http://blog.collaborationmatters.com | 4/21/2008 11:00:03 AM

    I wish I could turn off the phone altogether!

    There are a couple of services I have seen where VMs are transcribed to text messages, which sounds great, but the technology just isn't accurate enough yet.

  1. 7  Rob McDonagh http://www.CaptainOblivious.com | 4/21/2008 12:37:19 PM

    I once met a Fellow (I believe that was the term) at Lotus in Cambridge named Alex. And according to the other people at the meeting, Alex's voice mail greeting consisted of just these words: "Alex likes email."

    I have always wished I could get away with that. One of these days...

  1. 8  Steven  | 4/21/2008 1:30:11 PM

    VM is not dead everywhere. Our VM system processes well over 100,000 VMs per month and has been fully integrated with our Lotus Notes Inbox and Domino servers since 4.6.3b. Our BBs can play the VMs back too by just opening the email. Now if we could just get folks to stop replying to VMs that come from an outside caller. They can't seem to get the idea that you can't reply to a external caller's phone number (all the internal callers phone numbers get translated so the VM comes from their email address.)

  1. 9  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net | 4/21/2008 3:31:20 PM

    I've not answered my voicemail since Feb 2006 when I came back from Sabbatical. I decided to do it as an experiment, and it just stuck. Anyone that needs me, knows how to find me on email, my blog, chat, facebook, twitter, my mobile phone, etc. Anyone that calls my office phone is just trying to sell me something!

  1. 10  Keith Brooks http://lotustech.blogspot.com | 4/22/2008 8:17:44 PM

    Ed, our cards in the late 90's early 00 also included x.400 address in my case numerous notes.net/lotus email possibilities.