Just the other day I was reading a thread on a friend's Facebook feed on which she was complaining about how many voicemails she gets. She was also lamenting about how long it takes her to listen to each message and accurately transcribe them. Boy, can I relate to her frustration!

Voicemail had become such a problem for me a couple of years ago that I started to experience actual anxiety about the unlistened-to voicemails filling up my phone. Slowly I would see the number of messages increase day after day, as the older messages got buried further and further in the stack.

Part of my dread stems from the fact that I'm not much of a phone person. Which surprises me considering how many hours I spent with a receiver attached to my head as a teenager. But when your whole world is limited to school gossip and teen drama, the level of priority phone calls are infinitely more consequential compared the demands of adult life and responsibility. If ALL I had to do these days was talk on the phone, I'd probably still love it. But that is not the case. Now I have housework, work-work, pet-care work and everything-else-in-between work. Additionally, the ease and prevalence of text messaging has made it so much easier to be able to avoid the phone.