I had to call someone for an interview a couple days ago and I got her answering machine, and the message instantly annoyed me. It was one of those “let’s involve the whole family!” affairs, with every member present and accounted for: “Hi, this is Eric....and this is Emily....and this is Tyler....and this is Hailey...” and then they have the youngest, most illiterate of the bunch finish off the message in her squeaky, “you can’t understand me because I can barely form words” voice. I don’t know why such things bug the hell out of me, but they do. It’s not like I’m anti-kid or anything, it’s just ... I don’t know. I just feel like the answering machine is a utilitarian device, and should be treated as such. I don’t want to be subjected to a brief family play. I just want the beep.
So anyway, not 20 minutes later I called my sister, Kielynn, in Phoenix, wanting to gab during my half-hour drive home from work. I got her machine, and she’s got her nearly 9-month-old boy, Tesher, giggling on her message. It totally melted my heart. I mean, I almost hung up and called her back, just to hear that gratuitous little “heh...heh-heh....heh...” again.
Turns out the older I get, the more unabashedly hypocritical I become. And surprisingly, I’m fine with that.
4 comments:
I'm sitting here teary-eyed because that greeting was lost in the great cell phone provider change last Friday. It was totally unplanned the first time, Tesher wanted to play with the phone and crawled over while I was recording. I think I'll have to stage the new one though....
In three days I'll get to hold him while he giggles!!
I find your hard-and-fast opinions on answering machines particularly interesting, given your past work with Messages On Hold. None of your past customers really enjoyed listening to that stuff either, you know.... ;)
Good point. When you think about how painful it is to listen to that crap, you can imagine how excruciating it was to actually write it. (No offense Rossi....MOH has been darn good to you...)
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