The Bean Blog

Vonage on crack

Jul 4, 2008 A day in our life

The 4th of July is usually one of my favorite holidays. We have a lot of family traditions for the 4th of July holiday. Our cities Freedom Festival usually has a ton of activities scheduled for the holiday. There is the Red, White and Blue parade, the Balloon Glow, the annual kids race plus the 5K and 8K, the pancake breakfast and, of course, the cit fireworks display. Because of the flooding three weeks ago, all of that has been postponed until Labor Day. Since downtown was completely underwater and is now trying to dig out, we cannot have our usual festivities. It’s so sad.

But one of our traditions was still on. Yesterday we had our annual family picnic at my grandma’s tree. And this year the whole family was able to come back (except for one of my cousins). My grandpa has been having some health problems, and was actually not feeling that great yesterday, but at least we were all together yesterday. It was wonderful to see the whole family again.

A couple days ago my grandpa called to ask me if I would talk to my aunt and get the picnic organized. It was up to us to plan the food and figure out who was bringing what. She and I talked it over and figured it all out.

Currently we have Vonage for our phone service. I haven’t been too thrilled with our Vonage service. It’s really a crap shoot if we have service or not and, although customer service is very friendly, they aren’t all that helpful. Plus our internet has been very sporadic every since the flooding. It’s made us rethink whether or not we want VoIP for our phone service or not. We’ve decided not and will be getting a new land line next Monday.

But in the meantime Vonage has given us a trial of their Visual Voicemail service. Whenever I get a voicemail I get an email with a link to the message which you can listen to on Media Player and they also transcribe the message. However, the software they use is something less than stellar.

Yesterday morning my aunt called me to tell me the count she had for the number of hotdogs she was going to buy. I was responsible for the buns so she wanted to make sure I had enough. She called fairly early and I wasn’t out of bed yet so she left me a message. Other than the XXXs for her phone number this is exactly what Vonage sent to my email.

“Hi Cristipen (?), it’s Marlis (?). I having a (??) right know and get back to Canada 33 hot dogs. So, I was just calling if I need to get anymore buns cause you said you had undercover but, I don’t know if you would been able to be count on us. So, give me a call at XXX-XXX-XXXX and if you get this message and let 10 minutes to show it 5929 later. Alright, thanks. Bye.”

My aunt is a very educated woman. She has a master’s degree and works in education (at a college). She does not talk like this. The actual message was very coherent. This Visual Voicemail? Not so much. Christipen instead of Christine? Get back to Canada instead of got a count of? You had undercover instead of you said you had that covered? It just goes on and on from there. If we were sticking with Vonage I can guarantee we would not be paying for this service.

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Tags: 4th of July, family picnic, Iowa flooding, Visual Voicemail, Vonage