Don't try to leave me a voice message. I won't get it.

Voicemail needs to die. It's an archaic time-waster and nobody likes it. But it hangs on, undead, with bits and pieces falling off but still ready to bite your ear off and chew on the gristle.

Voicemail survives because it's interoperable, and because businesses hate to upgrade technology. Interoperability, in communication, is huge. It's one of the foundations of human society: the assurance that when you send a message, it will be heard and received. It's why I still love SMS and I'm deeply, deeply suspicious of iMessage, which is designed to socially alienate Android users from iPhone users.

Only an open standard can be truly interoperable and universal, which is why we live in a world of fragmented messaging apps. Facebook, Instagram, WeChat, WhatsApp, Viber and all of their ilk have profit motives to keep you in their silo and out of competing ones, just as Apple is trying to keep you away from Android with iMessage. That competition, in turn, has kept voicemail alive because it's the one thing everyone can count on.

It should be one of two things everyone can count on; SMS text messaging is open, interoperable, and supported by all the wireless carriers, some of whom are also major landline phone companies. But landline phones, especially the massive voice-over-IP installations that have taken over most businesses, don't support SMS, so you're stuck with voicemail. Although there are many, many OTT third-party providers offering landline-to-text services, there's just been no push to use them. Voicemail is a sunk cost. Voicemail-to-text would cost extra.

I remember reviewing a service I thought would free me from voicemail in 2007. 2007! Simulscribe, at the time, competed with Spinvox, Nuance, and later Google Voice in the voicemail-to-text sweepstakes, supposedly converting your voicemails to text messages. That could have been awesome, but nobody's quite nailed machine-based text transcription, even to this day. Google Voice transcriptions are still ridiculous. (I wish they were better; it would make my interview note-taking routine a lot easier.)

The saga of trying to make natural language voice interfaces work is a long, long story. I remember asking Bill Gates, of all people, about it at a tablet PC event in 2002, when we were all trying to figure out how you were supposed to enter data into something that didn't have a keyboard. I asked, what about natural language interfaces? He laughed; those are at least five years away, maybe 10, he said. It's been 14. We still don't have accurate voice transcription. Dragon NaturallySpeaking relies on being trained to one voice in a quiet room; it isn't scalable.

So cell phone plans still come with voicemail, although they all have texting as an option. Business phones all default to voicemail, because they have for 40 years, and business phone providers see no reason to change. And I've heard a few people still have home phones.

I know this isn't a new call. In 2014, Gawker ran a poetic, personal piece about voicemail, its history, and its possible demise (former PCMagger Leslie Horn wrote a similarly moving story about it for Gawker, too). But as your company (and mine) will probably never, ever upgrade its corporate phone system, we're going to have to take the situation into our own hands.

The only way to kill voicemail is to stop using it. Do what I did: call your voicemail now, and set a new greeting. "I no longer listen to voicemail. Please contact me by e-mail."