It irritates me when it rings, and at our house, it rings a lot. Leah’s a phone person, which is fine. She likes to talk, period, but she’s also very close to her family and friends, most of whom live out of town, so she’s frequently on the phone.
I prefer e-mail or even IM. I’m not typically someone who pays much attention to the substance of television ads, but I saw a couple recently that got me thinking. The first was an ad for…I think it was Cingular wireless (in a cruel twist of Heisenbergian fate, I can either pay attention to the name of the advertiser or the substance of the ad, not both), which has a neat feature whereby you can look at your celly’s display and see which of your contacts is online and available. It’s a marriage of IM and the phone, and it’s a feature that gets me one step closer to owning a cellular phone.
The other ad was for Mediacom, which is the company that provides my cable TV and Internet services. They’re running a special now where people who have cable and Internet service through them can get local and long distance phone service for $30/mo. That’s half what we’re now paying Qwest and AT&T. Best part is, all I had to do is call Mediacom, and they’ll contact Qwest and AT&T to let them know that I’ll no long require their services (it’s like having an agent). We get to keep our phone number. And we still get caller ID, voicemail, and call waiting. All for the $30 monthly fee. Until I can get Leah used to the idea of using a VoIP setup at home, this’ll save us a couple bucks a month.