I know there must be already guidelines available to either setup the Out Of Office or holiday greetings on phone or / and leaving messages on phone recipient not picked up the call. Guy Kawasaki has recently pointed one such tip for leaving message on a missed call – no surprises and guess work; also say name and number at the begin and the end of the call [see #12 on this blog post]. Yes- I used to do that long time ago – that I would call my friends/cousins and ask them to guess who I was. I know that sounds funny if I recall it today, but I didn’t have to do that. I guess it would have been better off if I had just mentioned my name at first.
How about the greeting messages we hear on some of the company / service industry phones?
I called up our doctor’s office over wee the week end. We know it was a labor day weekend and the offices would be closed. Since my wife wanted to see the doctor, I thought of just taking a chance and calling up that afternoon. It was about 1min and 49 seconds when I got an instruction to press what key to leave the message, after listening to all the story about why they are closed; when they would be open again; who can make appointments; what the next business day; etc etc et, al.
Oh… one of the wireless telephone service also has the similar system. I called few of our friends in the past week (we mostly have different service providers), it took few instructions before I learned whether to press 9 or # to submit my voice message. In my opinion why not give submit option first and then proceed with further instructions? 
