Nothing makes me more acutely aware of the pain of an open-plan office than receiving a voice note. I stop everything and pick apart my morass of tangled headphone cords to listen. Perhaps the most transformational innovation in telecoms since texting, they are also the most controversial, both reviled and loved. “People who send voice notes are poison,” one thinkpiece argued.
While leaving a voice note is as simple as tapping the microphone where you’d normally type with the keyboard into WhatsApp or iMessage, listening to them can be awkward. If you simply press play, anyone within earshot will hear. They make demands on your time and attention in a way a text message — readable anywhere, scannable in seconds — does not. “There’s an arrogance to them,” a friend said.
Yet like most new things I initially hate because they seem unnecessary, when really they are just different, I’m a convert. Now when I walk to the shop, I can be heard building tension in a dramatic retelling of a horrendous date directly into my phone.