Adam-Troy Castro

Writer of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Stories About Yams.

 

Things Hilarious in Retrospect: Answering Machines

Posted on May 22nd, 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Facebook 22 May 2017.

Things hilarious in retrospect: when answering machines, the precursor of voice mail, were new, the outgoing messages people set were laborious explanations of the process. Remember your cool bachelor Uncle with all the gadgets who was the first person you knew to have one, how carefully he enunciated the introduction to this unfamiliar phenomenon? “Hello. You have reached the home telephone number of Joe Smith. Joe is either not home right now or unable to come to the phone. This is an electronic answering device which will record your message so that when he returns, he may see that you called and call you back. In a few seconds you will hear a beep. This beep is your prompt to speak. You will have fifteen seconds to relay every possible piece of information he might need…”

In short, like that computer voice in the background, at the end of so many sf/fantasy and action movies, telling everybody that the reactor will explode in 32 seconds.

And today: “Yo. What you want?” Or, just the beep.

In between, we had an era of allegedly comical outgoing messages, people of no particular wit trying for comedy routines and usually failing.

My second longest outgoing message ever was a verse of Bob Dylan’s “What Was It You Wanted,” which I deftly arranged so that I identified myself during the instrumental bridge before Dylan returned to ask the title question again; I had that for months, until subjected to a tearful plea to stop by my mother, who had come to dread calling me because she couldn’t take that message any more. (There were days, as every grown offspring can testify, where that was a feature, not a bug.)

The longest, which I kept replacing with others and then returning to out of necessity, was word for word the following:

I repeat. Word for word.

“Hello. You have reached the number of Adam Castro. You have not reached the number of Vera Castro. I do not know Vera Castro, I am not related to Vera Castro, I have no useful information as to where you can find Vera Castro. Vera Castro is a total enigma to me. I understand that Vera Castro owes money all over town but I am a completely different person. If you want to reach Vera Castro, I can only wish you good luck. If you want to reach Adam Castro, you know what to do at the beep.”

My parents complained about having to sit through that one, too, but unless I went on at that length the messages were always stern warnings that the collectors were coming after Vera Castro. Even that message was not enough to deter some of them; there were messages to the effect that they “knew” Vera Castro lived with me and were not fooled. Sometimes I would pick up the phone and say things like, “Sure, send the cops over, right away,” or, “Vera’s here, but she’s sewn into the chicken suit and is only subsisting on feed right now.” Still, that message, and only that message, deterred 90% of them.

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