Gordon Matthews died the other day. You probably didn’t know him but you better believe he changed your life forever.
He was the father of corporate voice mail.
Before Matthews came along, you could actually connect with a real live person when you called a company instead of being consigned to voice mail purgatory. Of course, you could also play endlessly frustrating telephone tag.
Matthews understood the doubled-edged nature of his invention. “I always say half the world hates me, and the other half loves me,” he said on more than one occasion. He got that right. But love it or hate it, there was no escaping voice mail after Matthews had what he often called “this crazy idea” in the early 1970s.
On a visit to a company in Denver, he was having trouble contacting his own office in a different time zone when he happened to notice trash bins stuffed with those pink “while you were out” slips. Eureka.
Matthews patented his system in 1979, sold the first VMX–for voice mail express–to 3M Corp. shortly thereafter, and the rest is history.
Just before the stroke that ended his life last month at age 65, he had filed a preliminary patent for a top secret something that he told his wife would be bigger than voice mail. Hard to imagine what that might be, but feel free to press one for more options.
It’s a tribute to Gordon Matthews that you all know the drill.
