 So this is a story that has a bit of an intro before I get to the point, but let me just talk about you know You know seven eight years ago eight years ago I guess I you know moved into my current house and I kind of live far out in the middle of nowhere and I've got a decent size property I've got two and three-quarter acres are just shy thereof and I don't know all of that but the front half of it So probably about an acre and a half needs to be mowed and before I lived on a quarter of an acre And mowing it wasn't too much of a problem. It was very quick and easy Luckily my sister also lived not too far from where I live and she had a property about the same size and she used to mow But she eventually hired a lawn company to mow her lawn So she told me that I could have her or at least borrow her right on mower until she needed it back Which is great except for every time I went to use it It either had a flat tire the batteries was dead a belt came off It always took me at least 20 minutes before I could start mowing the lawn which which made it kind of a pain I didn't mind the mowing so much, but the prep to mow was just too much So eventually after a couple of years of fiddling with that. I actually gave that lawn mower to a friend I said if you come pick it up you can have it and I bought myself a cheap pusher mower for about a hundred bucks And I used that for a while now mowing a Acre and a half with a push mower Can take some time so what I was doing was I would order about a mow about a half or a quarter of that every week And I would just go around and that worked for me My wife did not appreciate having the lawn multiple different lengths So eventually I broke down and I hired a lawn crew and That lawn crew did a pretty good job for the first year and a half or so and then about a month ago They switched ownership and at which points they just kind of stopped showing up I At first, you know gave them some time I figure new ownership plus in the winter months They mow half as much as they do in the sermon months here in Florida because it rains like crazy in the summer So the grass grows like crazy, but it doesn't grow very much during the winter So usually they only come out once a month. So I figure new management You know and they're cutting back to the once the month this time of the year So I just let it go and let it go let it go and then after about six weeks or so Where in my grass was about thigh high And I was like, okay, I need to give these people a call. So I I call the owner and He said he was sorry and that they would be out tomorrow They didn't come out a week later. I call again. He says, oh, I'm sorry They'll be out tomorrow and they didn't and I actually just hired a new lawn company That should be coming in the next day or so which is all fine and dandy great But one of the things that bothered me besides the fact this lawn company kept promising to come out and never did Is that's one of the times I called them? you know the voicemail picked up for the company and You know played the message. Thank you for calling such and such. We were not available Please leave a message after the beep and then it said I'm sorry, but this mailbox is full and then hung up, you know it automated recording And I hear that every once in a while When I try to leave people voicemails and it blows my mind it is currently 2018 you're probably close listening to this probably early 2019 It who still has a voicemail box that gets full and you're running a company and you let it get full That's even worse, but it just drives me crazy because I Back in 2009 So a decade ago started using Google Voice now I know now everyone's a Google fan but I started using Google Voice and it gave you so much more functionality and back then Yeah, it was common. You could only have you know so many minutes of voicemail and You can only save the voicemails for like two weeks and then they would automatically delete but that was a decade ago and And at that point I switched to Google Voice and I haven't deleted a voicemail or text since Every single voicemail and every single text I've gotten since 2009. I still have I Can search through them I can go back it does transcripts I can word search search by who left the message by date Whatever I want and go back and listen to these things and some people I've talked to don't like I don't delete anything That I don't have to because why would you? Storage is so cheap nowadays. There's no reason to delete anything You should hold on to everything and then you can search through it as long as you keep it somewhat organized you can search through it later and why Would you want to like with emails unless it's complete junk mail if it's anything from anybody that's a legit email? I never delete it. I've talked to my father-in-law He deletes everything right away And then if he needs something he goes into the trash bin and look looks for it And I'm like why would you do that in the trash bin? It's gonna disappear after like 30 days Why not just keep it archive it and then you can search for it later because he's constantly looking for stuff in the trash bin Well, I need to keep my inbox clean. Well, yeah, that's what that's what labels and folders and whatnot are for But with the voicemails, it just doesn't make sense to me that Companies don't they give you limits still and it blows my mind that there's still people who use these services because I'm like Google Voice is free since then I've switched to Google Fi and it gives me the same functionality I can go back through all my voicemails from whatever and it all filtered over when I switched to Google Fi from Google Voice So everything's still there from before I still have everything and I still just don't see a reason to get rid of it and Why companies Wouldn't I would assume a lot of these companies might be keeping this information But limiting your access to it if that makes sense because why would a company? Delete data like that where companies like Google thrive on it. That's how they live That's how they make money. Why would T-Mobile or Sprint or Verizon? I don't know if these what companies still limit you on the number of voicemails you have and for how long you can keep them But it's not a lot of storage for them and that's just more information on their customers They have so wouldn't be surprised me that they keep copies. I mean you got to think about it These servers that these these voicemails are stored on they have to be making backup copies of them in case their servers go down So they have multiple copies. So just because they delete it from the current copy that you're running off of you Would think they would still have copies on backup. So why why are they limiting your access to it? And let me give you an example of how much the saving voicemails cost these these companies The limit to a length in a voicemail at least with my Google Fi and Google Voice is three minutes It cuts off which is good because I have had a few cases where I know people who don't know how to hang up their phones I think I've mentioned that in the past I have a family member who I've tried to talk to about this or at least my wife has tried to talk to about this Every time she calls my wife and leaves a voicemail It's a 30-second voicemail, but then it just goes on and on you can hear her talking in the background until it cuts off at three minutes because she doesn't know how to hang up the phone and You don't want a voicemail to just record forever if someone doesn't hang up I had a doctor's office call me last week leave me a 20-second voicemail and then it was silence for the next till the Three-minute mark. I'm assuming that they you know hung up their phone But somehow it was still on like hold or something like that. So my phone didn't realize disconnected So it's good that they limit you to a three-minute voicemail, but three minutes is the max So I took one of those three-minute voicemails and downloaded it and it was just over 300 kilobytes So you figure it's a hundred kilobytes per minute. So that's 60 megabytes an hour, right? That's that's not that much These aren't there when I download it because with Google Fi and Google voice you have the option to you know Download your voicemails as a wave file. They're not MP3s because they don't need to have that dynamic range that music has It's just someone talking like me right now So you can actually use a wave with a lower rate and still get you know You just need to understand the person but 60 megabytes a minute. Let's do the math on that So you figure let's see that I'm trying to do math in my head here real quick 10 hours would be 600 megabytes. So 10 hours of data can fit on a Standard CD and still have plenty of room. So if you were to take that, let me let me open up a calculator here real quick so we'll say 60 megabytes per hour times 24 hours in a day times 356 days in a year that looks like Just over five gigs If I'm doing my math right Yeah, if I did my math right five gigs a year That's if you recorded voicemail non-stop for an entire year five gigs is nothing even if actually no I'm sorry. I think I got the decimal point in the wrong spot. I think it's 50 gigs But 50 gigs that's if someone left you a voicemail non-stop for a year. You're not really going to ever do that really Depending on who you are. It's gonna vary a lot but let's say I get five voicemails a day and They're all 30 seconds long There's no way I'm gonna even get close to that literally I'm sure that if I took all of my voicemails in the last ten years I could probably fit them all on a CD no problem and a CD is what 10 cents obviously they wouldn't store them on CDs They're gonna be storing them on servers But that that is nothing to to for a few dollars a year to have that sort of data on your users It's great for a company I you know people may not like that but it's great for a company and it's great for me to have access to that But the fact that they set the limits to this day It just blows my mind that when I call somebody and it says their voicemail box is full It's just like how do you get to that limit and why do you still have a limit? It just blows my mind It's crazy and when when there are voicemail services out there that are free and You may not like the free ones But there's also paid ones that probably cost a couple dollars a month to where you have this functionality a lot of people may not care But if I call you and your voicemail box is full Especially if you're running a business that looks very bad on you and your business Anyway, thanks for listening visit films by Chris calm. That's Chris the K There's a link in the description. Let me know what you think below Do you think that there should be limits? Do you understand why there's limits on? voicemail storage do you I mean Even if you don't even if you dislike like the whole privacy part of it. They're still having recordings of that those companies still have those recordings So, I mean if you don't like that, you don't do voicemail at all, but if you're gonna have voicemail why not have Unlimited voicemail it benefits you and the company in that case and if privacy is a concern You wouldn't do voicemail at all on someone else's system. So again films by Chris calm That's Chris the K there's a link in the description and I hope that you have a great day