h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ansaphone technology was new to my dad. When I gave
him one for Christmas he set it up and recorded a
message and my friends began leaving messages ... but
they were always giggling. Finally one day I had
occasion to call home and got a message which said
"HELLO.
You have reached the Cassel residence.
I am not here.
If you wish to leave a message, wait till the tone.
You have one minute to speak."

It did, and still does, however, serve one really
important and useful function: it warns people who
have just punched in a wrong number that they have
screwed up.

Lil

My father's ansafone message also starts with "Hello", followed by quite a long pause, that has caused many an unwary caller to initiate a conversation with it.

Since my dad is a bit of a techno-fan who had an answering machine long before most other people, I'm not sure if he does it as a joke, or if he is just going mad.

Oh yes, not just the long interval but the interminable delay before the owner of the phone number even begins to speak, when you can hear the TV playing, outside traffic, the dog being beaten and so on.

At the other extreme, the welding instructor at a school I work for is much more terse, possibly as a consequence of his experiences in Vietnam. You dial his number and a voice says "Talk."

My cousin and I at university used to make really long messages that would make people annoyed when they called because they'd have to sit through the whole message before they could talk. We had to make them shorter because our parents got mad calling long distance and being charged to listen to us carry on. IT was fun while it lasted though.

It's an original thought, though, and makes me realize that one of the good things about the older cassette-driven answering machines was that you could easily swap messages out. With the new digital ones you have to overwrite every time.

The system we were using was "voicemail" provided by the university which we accessed on the phone, so it was terribly east to switch messages. we had lots of fun- pretending that our stuffed animals were rioting, etc.

The best recorded message I ever heard was when I dialed a wrong number and heard some old fart yelling into his machine "How does this #$%^& thing work? Gladys!! Is this piece of #%^*@! on?!" Beeeeeep.

That would weed out the sinners pretty quickly...