Have you ever made a phone call praying to someone’s voicemail, and the person picks up? Doh. I can name two scenarios that just happened in the past week. In some situations, you struggle for words because you weren’t expecting the person to pick up

Translated and abstracted; “I want to communicate something to you, but I don’t want to DIRECTLY communicate with you.” Enter Slydial, a phone service that essentially connects you directly to someone’s mobile voicemail.

Whaaaat!?! Ramsey, that’s silly. Why would you ever want to go directly to voicemail?

Well — think about it… it’s a brilliant cheat and an illusion of communication. You can leave late night happy birthday voicemails, avoid talking to your boss to tell him you’re late, dump your girlfriends, avoid a long convos with your parents, and leave client direct voicemails and not interrupt your/their workflow (I do openly acknowledge that if you use this service for these reasons, you can argue it’s a not-so-valiant character trait to possess).

The service is free (you have to listen to an advertisement) so I tried it out for myself. All you do is call 267-759-3425 and then enter the mobile number you want to connect to voicemail. Annnnnnd sure enough it works like it says it does. Pretty slick. So now I’ve added slydial to my contacts list — we’ll see if it comes in handy in the upcoming week.

The idea and concept of this service made me step back and want to catalog technologies/mediums we use for communication. In my opinion, these are in order from highly direct, to least personal:

1.) Face-to-Face
2.) Phone
3.) Instant Messenger
4.) Voicemail
5.) Text Messaging
6.) Email
7.) Letter/Postal Mail

What’s interesting about the introduction of the service Slydial — is the use of technology to deceive. No one can deny we are slaves to our devices that allow us to be reachable and connected (i’m guilty). I think it’s a important skill in life to understand when and what medium to choose from the list above.

Does Slydial cross the line of morality? Is it even ethical to use such a service? You can argue that Slydial is just a compliment to the medium itself. In my opinion, I think it all depends on the situation and the person, but ultimately Slydial can help a person concerned with efficiency and time. In retrospect, it also can greatly benefit cowardly people who like to avoid direct communication.
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