Srcasm

When I used to receive 10-20 voicemail messages per day from the office, it was a complete pain in the arse to go through them each hour to make sure I wasn’t missing something important.  When the server room was down?  ”Sorry, didn’t get that memo,” was not a viable solution.  So I looked at a service called Simulscribe.  I fell in love with the service immediately.  It was simple — Sign up, redirect voicemail to their phone number and never check my voicemail again.  How do they do it?  It’s simple, as PhoneTag (previously Simulscribe) shows you:

I wasn’t too skeptical of whether or not a service like this could take off.  To my amazement, I was not the only person out there that valued their time and didn’t want to waste 30 minutes per day listening to messages (most of which were junk) when they could be working, on the golf course or simply taking a relaxing bubble bath.  Today, PhoneTag has been written about in The New York Times, Forbes and even NPR (Radio?  What’s that?).

Yeah, it may not be free anymore but I still highly recommend their service to anyone that cares about how they spend 1/16th of their work day.  It’s a lot of time to be spending with a phone pressed against your ear and it can really hurt your neck.  You wouldn’t want to get hurt by listening to voicemail, right?  That’d be embarrassing.

We’ve all had those days where we just can’t make it into the office or had an obligation mid-day and it just didn’ t make sense to make the commute both ways…  And some of us have the luxury to do this thing we like to call WFH (or work from home).  Well, TechCrunch had a post about a product that may solve some of your WFH issues (such as not being around to physically say hi to someone or giving people the ability to put a face to a name).

TiLR from RoboDynamics created the first “robotic telepresence platform” or in other words, one of the coolest work gadgets yet!  I could see great uses for this device in my work situation.  Many time I work from home but need to meet with people either in a meeting room or at my desk.  It would be very helpful to be able to actually move around the building, walk over to some one’s desk and ask show them what I needed to show them.  It could be a bit scary at first and people could take advantage of the product over time and use it for some not-so-nice uses but it’s a definitely a great idea.

In all seriousness though, it begs the question — Would it be easier for people to convince their bosses that they should WFH if they had the ability to virtually walk around, talk to people and show people themselves while sitting at home in their underwear?  And on top of that, if anyone would like to attempt to get into their beta program, I’d be happy to test out the TCC (TiLR Command Center) for you.