Google Voice is a fantastic (and free!) new service that you really ought to try if you can get your hands on an invite. Hard to explain, but it’s a universal number that you use to route your phone calls & text messages to whichever phone you happen to be using at that moment. If you have multiple phones, you can have calls routed to your work phone during the day and to your home or cellphone after hours. You can ring any or all your phones at once, and whichever one you pick up is the one that gets the call. If you’re hiking on the Appalachian trail and out of cellular range, route your number to the landline in your cabin. You can make lists of your contacts and send different people to different phones… work contacts to work, friends to your cellphone? You can record different greetings — say, a short one for friends and a longer “I can’t come to the phone right now” type message for unknown callers. (I made special personalized greetings for my mom and my dad.) You can block callers or send certain people straight to voicemail every time. All your voicemails and text messages are archived on the web for you, and the best part? Everything can be transcribed into text… and if you like, the transcription can be rocketed off to you via direct SMS and/or e-mail. Sometimes the transcription can be comically off, but it seems to work well enough to give you a general idea of what the caller’s going on about without having to actually listen to the message. There are a lot more features; it’s a very deep service with a bit of a learning curve, but it’s well worth the bit of extra effort you’ll need to become a true GV ninja.

Google Voice is currently in beta with some sort of waiting list for invites; I was lucky in that I had an old account with Grand Central, which later got bought by Google, spiffed up and turned into the current service. Everybody on Grand Central got the option to turn their account into a Google Voice one, so that’s what I did. I wasn’t crazy about the number GC had originally given me but I was able to pay a one-time fee of ten bucks to get a new & more memorable one in the area code of my choosing. So now, no matter where I move off to, no matter where I’m staying or what phone I happen to be close to, I can always get my calls routed to the best place. I can give out one number that’ll (in theory) follow me around for the rest of my life… knock on wood that those years be many.

More reading if you’re interested…