answering machines

 Reading the saga of your troubles with Petosky, a couple things have come to mind.  You don't have a credit card?  And you don't have an answering machine?  

In the pantheon of modern conveniences I don't think the answering machine gets its due.  One nice thing about the days before the answering machine was that you could always get ahold of somebody.  Not if they weren't home of course, but if they were they would almost always answer it.  It seems like the rings were louder then than they are now, but maybe it was just that they were more important.

Because you never knew who was calling, or, if you lived in a house with other people, who the call was for.  It could be great news and it could be terrible news or it could be a long winded busybody, and you had to answer it to find out.  On the other side if nobody answered your call it was almost certain that they were not home, and nobody would know that you called.

And then came the answering machines, the first ones to own them were the up to date folks, always glomming onto the next thing and a little annoying because of that.  Who doesn't remember when they first came across one?  At first everything seemed normal, you heard the voice of the person you were calling and you were just about to say something but something was off and you realized that this was a recorded message.  This was one of those new-fangled gadgets that you had read about in Life Magazine.

Well dadgum it if that didn't beat all, and you were unsure how to answer because you had never done this before, and then you realized that your stammers were being recorded and you were sounding like some hick from the sticks.  You switched to your cosmopolitan man-about-town tone, but you couldn't help but be a little offended that you were being asked who you were and why you were calling and what is your number by some doggone machine.  And now whatever you said would stay on that damn cassette until the callee came home and saw the blinking light, and then they would call you back at a time of their leisure, or perhaps they would forget or just not bother for some reason.

But it was great to have one you realized after you wisely waited for the price to come down.  Now it was you who was responding to the blinking light, you who was deciding when it would be convenient to call back, if at all.  But even better than that was letting the phone ring and waiting to hear the answer on the machine and then deciding whether or not to pick up.  A little insulting to the caller sometimes to realize that you were letting them go to machine, even though you had no way of knowing it was them, but you know how people are, so maybe you would breathe a little heavy, so it would sound like you had dashed across the room, just to be polite you know.

And then another development once the machines became popular and almost everybody but the stick in the muds had them, was you would wait to call people until you were pretty sure that they would not be home.  Because you know, you have to be social, ask about the little ones, gab about the weather, be sociable when you really only wanted to know the answer to a simple question.  And then maybe they would wait to call you until they knew you wouldn't be home for the same reason.  Very cosmopolitan for the two of you..

I'm planning on moving on to more sophisticated answering machines and cell and smart phones in the next post.  Don't bother to drop me a line because I will be screening you.  

But just for the record, did you have an answering machine?