Voice mail victims of the world, unite!

A White Bear wonders why we tolerate insanely long voicemail messages:

An infuriatingly calm female voice slowly intones things I can fucking take for granted, given that I am a sentient being who apparently has placed a phone call, probably more than once in my life.

The answer, I guess, is that we need the party we're calling more than they need us. The electric utility, for instance. We're calling either to report an outage, or to pay the bill at the last minute to prevent an outage. Either way, we need our freakin' electricity ON, and we are not going to hang up because Prozac Jane takes four minutes to explain the menu options to us.