<blockquote>Inefficiency is subjective: what's experienced as inefficiency by me or you is perfectly efficient, actually, just so long as you're a phone company and your goal is making money. Voicemail thus has much in common with "dark patterns", a term coined by the tech consultant Harry Brignull, to refer to the sneaky ways in which websites "trick users into doing things they might not otherwise do, [such as] signing up for recurring bills". As with voicemail, these often look like incompetent design, but they're not. [...] What feels like tiresome inefficiency, born of sloppiness, really arises because it serves someone's interests.</blockquote>