To arms! How to join David Pogue’s Take Back the Beep campaign

New York Times gadget guy David Pogue has the sense to take on a problem smaller than global warming: He’s decided to call out wireless carriers on their time-wasting voicemail greetings. These messages, as anyone who follows the mobile industry knows, are there to run up the number of minutes used by customers who call in to leave or check messages, wasting their lives and running up their phone bills 15 seconds at a time. It’s the same reason voicemail systems are rigged to force you to listen to one message after another, running up more minutes, rather than skipping to the one you want.

In his Take Back the Beep campaign, Pogue has reported, for example, that T-Mobile deleted hundreds of posts from its online customer forums and then blocked posts containing the word “beep.”

Today, Pogue announced that leading blogs Engadget, Gizmodo and Consumerist have joined him in asking readers to tell America’s four biggest wireless carriers they’re sick of listening to inane talk like “Record your message after the tone.”

Here are the instructions Pogue and his cohorts are distributing. In all four cases, the carriers are changing their attitudes, from deleting posts to at least pretending to care.

Verizon: Post a complaint here: http://bit.ly/FJncH.

AT&T: Send e-mail to: customerissues@attnews.us.

Sprint: Post a complaint here: http://bit.ly/9CmrZ

T-Mobile: Post a complaint here: http://bit.ly/2rKy0u.

[Image from Textually.org]