David Pogue of The New York Times whipped up a frenzy against the cellphone companies. As soon as he urged everyone to rise up against those absurd voicemail instructions used by every cellphone provider in his "Take Back the Beep" campaign, 28,032 blogs wrote about it, and thousands of e-mail messages rained down on Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint in a torrent of disdain.

Now, there's a glimmer of hope, and results could be on the way. AT&T gave the most forthright response, promising to "make some changes" (you already don't get those annoying instructions if you have an iPhone). Sprint tells us you can eliminate those lame-brained instructions yourself by going into the personal options menu. T-Mobile declares that "this issue has our attention," perhaps implying that some action will be taken.

The laggard in this outrage is Verizon Wireless, giving the characteristic cellphone company runaround to Pogue and everyone else. The brazen company even suggests that you can turn off voicemail altogether if you don't like those 15-second time-wasting instructions. It also says you can press * to bypass the instructions, but how are we going to know when we're calling someone from Verizon?

Let's let Verizon know what we think of their time-wasting, billion-dollar-gouging 15-second recording that we're all forced to listen to. People, rise up! Post a complaint against Verizon here: http://bit.ly/FJncH.

Via The New York Times