Voicemail Experiment

A year or two ago, I had this thought… What if I changed my placeholder Google Voice phone number to something cooler? The one I had was a 213 area code, but it ended in 5359. I realized that there was a slim chance that 788-5359 might be available in a random area code. When I typed in 788-5359, the one that popped up as available just so happened to be in the 786 area code. Now while I’m a born and raised Miami, FL kid, 786 is the lesser area code, because the original that everyone knows is 305. That said, having 786-788-5359 as a number to do something cool with was too good to pass up. For those not understanding why it’s a cool number, here’s the breakdown:

Number meaning breakdown

I finally decided to use the number for a new experiment. The Tangible Life hotline of sorts. When you dial that number, you’ll go straight to a voicemail greeting that will offer a prompt for you to respond to. I plan to change the prompt every month or so, and I can’t wait to hear the messages that random people of the internet decide to leave me. There was someone else that did a similar experiment on their blog, but I can’t find the reference to it. I’ll come back and edit this post to cite them when I do, because minus having a really cool and unique to me number, I’m doing basically the same thing they did and that’s where I got the idea.

I think this is such a cool experiment that I even added a dedicated icon to the site nav for this, and it takes visitors to a dedicated page explaining the process (without all the background included in this post).

⭥ Site Index   |   ↻ Random Post