Voice mail

I've been working as a telemarketer for a while now. The last two projects involved me calling GSM phones. As those always pick up (to the voice mail, if nothing else), I've heard quite a lot of those by now. It's kinda nice to see what people put on their voice mail sometimes...

Obviously, by far the most used is a text in the sense of "This is the voice mail of <owner>. Please leave your message after the beep, and I'll call you back as soon as possible." Sometimes, though, these aren't grammatically correct ("You're talking to the voice mail of <owner>", which obviously isn't true—at most, I could be listening to it). One noteworthy example said "mouse" instead of "beep". Think about it...

However, there are a lot of other things one could encounter when calling up to someone and getting his or her voice mail. A shortlist:

• The (beginning of the) owner's favorite song. Quite funny actually, hearing "Kids in America" or "Nothing else matters" until it's suddenly interrupted by a beep.
• Some funny text which appears to be available for download somewhere (since you hear them identically the same way on multiple people's voice mails). Notable examples include Bert and Ernie imitations, someone telling you he's in jail and "that he won't be available for a while", and others.
• Confused people who don't appear to know that they're recording their voice mail. Person A: "Oh, it's recording now". Person B: "Really?". Person A: "I think so, not sure though. Wait, let's try to..." <beep>
• Just a bit of background noise. Wonder why someone would want to do that—as a caller, you're not sure whether the callee just inadvertently pushed a button on the phone, or whether something else is going on.
• A recording of some error message as it's being generated by the phone company. "Your connection has ended due to technical reasons. Please try again later." I suspect these are an effort to avoid people like me. Not that I could blame them, of course...
• Recently, I encountered a new type: people who let other people speak up their voice mail message. "This is the secretary of mr foo", or a child's voice saying "This is the voice mail of mr bar, CEO of quux".

That's about it, I think. Well, apart from the default voice mail message with the callee's number being pronounced by a computerized voice, of course. Amazing how many people just don't bother saying something to their voice mail; by far more than half of the voice mail messages I hear are the default one. Which is incredibly boring...