It is Thursday afternoon at 4:00 and you just got the call that every coach hates to get. The recreation center manager notifies you that the thunderstorm that just came through has saturated all the playing fields. There is no way they will be dry by 6:30 that evening; your softball game has been cancelled.
Back in the old days, not only did a call like this bring disappointment, but it also brought about 45 minutes worth of hard work, causing coaches to put their work or families on hold while they played phone tag with their entire team. But nowadays, because of a great service called voice messaging, these scenarios are a thing of the past.
Let’s play that scene again, but this time with a smart coach who has subscribed his team to a voice messaging service. Thunderstorm comes through; phone call comes in from recreation center. Bad news? Oh well. Smart coach picks up the phone and dials into his voice messaging service and enters his pass code. Smart coach simply records a quick message, notifying his players of the cancellation, elects to send the message out immediately to all team members, and then hangs up the phone and goes back to work or family.
The voice messaging system does all the heavy-lifting, notifying the entire team at pre-defined numbers so that they don’t make a needless trip to an empty, drenched ball field; and if the voice messaging system does not get them “live,” it will leave a message so that they will be sure to hear it later when they are available.
Coaches never had it so good. Now if they could just come up with a technology that could delay thunderstorms until after the game!
