Alsop's Small Thoughts

Vote no on Harriet

David Brooks persuaded me this morning in his column in The New York Times, titled "in Her Own Words" that Harriet Miers doesn't deserve to be a Supreme Court Justice of the United States.  He includes observations written by her as president of the Texas bar that are so vapid and uninteresting that it appears to me to be a disaster to have her on our court of last resort. 

Sub-rant on the NY Times: I apologize for not including a link to the column, but the New York Times has recently introduced something called Times Select, for  which you either have to pay or register as a print subscriber, which I am. But the nytimes.com informs me that I am registered for Times Select but gives me no clue how to get there and apparently has got me registered as two different people with different email addresses. So I gave up rather than spend the rest of the morning trying to figure it out. Go buy a copy of the Times if you don't have one; the column is on the Op-Ed page.

Voice Mail Etiquette

I wish everybody would pay more attention to their voice mailboxes. To wit:
1) Please configure your cell-phone mailbox. If you don't use paging or other features, configure your mailbox to suppress those options so we don't have to hear that they are available every we call you before we can leave a message.
2) Please start your outgoing message by saying how to skip it, so frequent callers don't have to listen to your whole message before being able to leave a message. (Since I use my cell phone a lot, there's nothing more frustrating than having to wait through all this and then lose the signal before I can leave a message.)
3) Please don't answer your phone if you can't talk. I've had this happen numerous times, when people answer the phone to say (in a whisper) that they can't talk because they are in a meeting. My immediate thought is: "Why the heck did you answer the phone then?" I would prefer to leave a message if you can't talk.
4) Please be honest about your voice mailbox. If you don't use a particular mailbox (at home, at work or even on cell), say so and redirect the caller to a different number. One of my frequent contacts has just let his voice mailbox fill up so that it is not possible to leave messages anymore. This seems an inefficient use of the callers' time, versus just admitting that you don't use the mailbox.
Eventually, we'll get what we all really want: a single mailbox for all kinds of phones, rather than this mishmash where PBX vendors and service providers each try to control our business by providing a single, proprietary mailbox that doesn't integrate with any others. (And then we'll have voice mail that delivers an email notice that you have a message, maybe even including the message.)
If you have additional rules you'd like to add, please comment or send me an email and I'll modify this posting over time to reflect input.

Blearning

I'm learning about blogs, which is one reason to write small thoughts, the blog. And I've learned that not posting is bad! I haven't posted for more than a week, which doesn't lead anyone to read the blog regularly. I should have known that anyway, since I used to be a columnist. And columnists (good ones, anyway) learned that regular publication is what addicts readers.