15 Using English at Work

Lesson 2 - Checking Mail, Email, and Voicemail

from other people and then forward them to their friends. When my friends forward messages to my work email address, I have to make sure I respond to or answer them using my personal email address, not my work email address. When I don't have time to finish a message, or when I get interrupted, I save my message into my draft folder. A "draft" is an unfinished document, or something that you have begun to write but have not yet finished. You go through many drafts, usually, when we write things, especially formal reports. We hope that each time we write a new draft, or revise or change the draft it gets better. A "draft folder" is where an email program puts messages that you have started writing but aren't ready to send yet, you still haven't finished them. Later, when you have time, you can go back to your draft folder, finish writing the message that you started earlier, and then send it to someone after you've finished it.

Finally, or lastly, I check my voicemail. "Voicemail" is a system of recorded voice messages from people who call your phone number when you aren't able to answer the phone. We used to have what we called "answering machines," which had cassette tapes to record messages, but most companies today are computerized and they use something that we call "voicemail." At my house, however, we still have one of the old answering machines, not voicemail.

I call the voicemail system and enter in my PIN. "PIN" is an acronym, where each letter is the first letter of another word. Here "PIN" means "Personal Identification Number." A PIN is usually a set of secret numbers - four to six -that are used as a password for getting information or for getting money. When you take cash out of an ATM or bank machine, you usually have to enter your PIN. You might also have a PIN for registering for a class at college. The PIN I'm talking about here is for listening to my voicemail messages.

When using voicemail, you can often use your PIN to bypass the outgoing message. "To bypass something" means to skip something or to go around something that you don't want to see or hear. For example, many websites have introductory screens, sometimes with video and music; you can usually bypass this introduction - these screens - by clicking on "skip introduction" or "skip this." "To skip" is the same as to go to the next step without looking or seeing the current screen. When I call the voicemail system, it usually plays my "outgoing message," the message people hear when they call me. But by entering my PIN I bypass that outgoing message, because I don't need to hear it.

After listening to two new messages, I save one and I delete the other. "To save" means to keep something for use in the future, it's the opposite of delete or throw away. We usually save important emails from our friends, we save photos that were taken when we were with our friends, in this case, I'm saving a voicemail

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