Colm O'Regan: Who even uses voicemail anymore? It's all WhatsApp voice notes now 

I trust the phone again. 

For a while. The epidemic of robotic scam calls warning you that Revenue is after you has waned for now. No doubt another wave is on the way. Perhaps the hackers realised that they might need to invest in a voice that sounds a bit more believable than the Squid Game’s Evil Yank they used before.

Expect the next iteration of scam calls to be more country-specific. A robot saying “Cmere-I-wantcha lookit, gwan, hah, shur this is it.”

Despite the robots, it still managed to make us distrust the phone itself.

I wonder when the printing press came out first, was there a period when people stopped trusting pamphlets because there were reports of them being pressed into your hand by people trying to hack you to find out where in the rafters or your mouth you had hidden your gold. Of course, that was in the days when they actually hacked you.

Anyway, I missed a call and felt it was safe to call them back straight away. Their line was engaged. So whoever they were, they were over a certain age. Because they were leaving a voicemail.

The voicemail: A cultural institution that is severely on the wane. I’m just about old enough to check them and just about too young to leave them.

Voicemail will soon become retro, like delivering a letter. One sealed with wax from your signet ring. (If you wrote the letter in a panic and put the first draft in and regretted what you’d said.) 

Hipsters dressed in antimacassars will be doing it ironically in cafés in the same way they once Instagrammed themselves cradling record players or type-writering.

And that’s the thing about voicemails. Maybe they never suited us. We had to have them when there were no other options but they were a tension-laden thing.

First there was the recording of your own voicemail message. If you bothered to do that, rather than fumble around in the darkness of the automated options pressing HASH, hating the sound of your own voice and re-recording repeatedly. (“Too relaxed/Too nobby/Who is that? Is that ME?”)

Then there was the bother of retrieving them. Sorting through the arse-dials and: “Hello oh god I hate these yokes anyway how are you that’s all the news bye-byebyebye. It’s Mam by the way.”

And on the other side of the voicemail, you were put on the spot to come up with a succinct reason for calling this person and losing faith in your message and saying “Anyway just call me” and cringing at how desperate you sounded. Let’s just say Zip Up Your Mickey-gate would not have happened now with a WhatsApp voice note.

The WhatsApp voice-note is a curious development. During the pandemic, they went viral telling us the army was going to be out imposing martial law in their tank. 

But I first saw it a few years ago when a woman ahead of me in a queue had a full conversation with it. I couldn’t figure out what she was doing. She would speak, wait, listen, react and then speak again. Like a walkie-talkie. This won’t take off, I thought. 

But voice notes have become ubiquitous. It still feels weird to me, but it’s also civilised. As if people are listening to each other before replying. Not all WhatsApp voice messages are civil. In fact, some people display a lot of NEEEEECCKKKKK.

Actually, maybe that’s where the scammers will get us next. “Just got off the phone from me uncle’s brother’s dog-groomer and they say the army will be out imposing martial law but the way to avoid it is to send on your bank account details for safe-keeping …”