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Phone services

You’re waiting for an important telephone call on an important contract. The phone rings and it’s your best friend who needs your ear for half an hour. You can’t hang up on the off chance your contract caller will ring in the next half an hour, as that would damage your friendship, so you just have to hear the conversation out. Meanwhile somebody is trying to get through but because you don’t have any phone services you have no idea.

In a situation like that a standard telephone answering machine, whether it’s ancient with an inbuilt tape recorder or modern with its own solid state memory, is useless. The telephone line is engaged, thanks to your friend’s call, so no one can get through to leave a message.

TELECOM AND VODAFONE HAVE AN ANSWER

Both Telecom and Vodafone, the telecommunications giants in New Zealand, offer their own solutions which would save both your friendship and secure your contract.

For $9.95 per month Telecom’s Call Minder will answer any calls you can’t, whether you are away from your telephone or on the telephone line, and allow any telephone caller to leave a message in your virtual mailbox. Telecom promises its Call Minder customers can listen to telephone messages from almost any touch-tone telephone in New Zealand.

For $12 per month Vodafone offers a similar voicemail service along with a call waiting service, which alerts you to the fact that someone else is on the telephone line and wants to talk to you, and a caller display service, which displays the details of the person who is on the telephone line.

Call waiting also allows you to switch between two calls simultaneously, so you can console your friend while closing that crucial business deal.

GREAT FOR OFFICE AND HOME

The caller display service is also ideal for deciding whether it’s worth interrupting your lunch, or that crucial episode of your favourite television show.

With such services installed, either on the home or home office telephone line or the office telephone line, suddenly it does not seem so rude to make your excuses and hang up on your friend when you can tell them that the nice man with that lucrative contract is waiting for you to answer your phone.

Although they cost much more than the one off purchase of a mechanical answering machine such telecommunications services, offered by the telecommunications companies, are better than a mechanical machine.

For one they never need servicing, for another they never fail when the power does, and thirdly nobody but the person with the telephone account’s Personal Identification Number can access the mailbox and delete messages. Just be sure to have a pen and paper ready when you access yours.