Telephone Answering Machine Blues

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ILLUSTRATION: RICK KIRKMAN
Proficiency in college level math and wartime flight experience impart almost enough knowledge to use a modern telephone answering machine.

In 1984 I bought a telephone answering machine and plugged it in at my home near Sonoma, California. I didn’t really want it. I didn’t really trust it.
 

I’m 75. My all-time favorite phone was the phone we had at Bushwillie Farm in East Pittsford, Vermont, when I was a small kid. It was a brown wooden box slung on the kitchen wall. Inside the box were some primitive electrical bits that I took for granted. You turned the crank two or three revolutions — brrrng, brrrng, brrrng — then lifted the receiver off the hook and a real-live operator said “number, please.” The operator rang the number for you, unless someone was on the line. In that case you hung up, waited, and tried again.

That was a swell telephone. It’s been downhill ever since.

I bought my first answering machine because I had been hired to do some PR work for a six-foot-five-inch gung ho land developer. He said he roomed with Ted Kennedy at Harvard and flew B-47s on recon flights over Communist Poland. Dan (I called him Dan) was a Big Spender. Dan suggested that I buy an answering machine because Lord knows how many calls I’d get once people heard about his ideas. My job with Dan lasted two months, the answering machine lasted a while longer.

  • Published on Oct 1, 1994
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