How often does this happen to you. You check your cell phone and there is a message waiting. You call the voice mail box and hear the soothing tones of voice mail lady,
"Wednesday two thirty-six p.m." followed by the voice of a comrade,
"Hi, (your name here) It's (friend's name) It's, uh, about two two thirty- two thirty-five on wednesday the, aaahh- Hey, what the date?- anyway..."
Your friend, bless their heart, was trained back in the 1900s when the professional and considerate thing to do when leaving a phone message was to include the time of the call. That way when you’re playing back an old message, you’ll know just how old it was. Thank you.
That was then. However, it’s 2006, techno-geezer, I know what time it is. Since my first pager in 1983 to this day, every voice mail I've ever had would tell me what time a message was left. And it’s been at least a decade since I’ve owned an answering machine that didn’t have a clock in it as well.
So it’s just plain redundant to leave the time you called in a message. I know it’s maybe 10 seconds a message, repeated if I have to play it again, but it’s ten seconds that I will spend thinking less of you. Imagine, you’re checking your messages in some noisy hallway or parking garage, struggling to hear over the racket and find a spot where the signal is strong, and by the time you’ve figured out that somebody is telling you what you didn’t need to hear again the noise rises and you miss what you really need to hear so you have to play the message again from the beginning, and more clearly you listen to your buddy stammering precisely as they can through the incorrect time, including the date, because you probably don’t check your cell phone more than once a month.
If you want to be considerate, and who doesn't, you might leave your phone number AT THE BEGINNING of the message, so we don’t have to play the entire message again to write it down. And thanks to caller ID, you don’t often have to do that unless your number is blocked and the recipient isn’t a regular with you.
So there you have a little more instruction in the care and feeding of me. You may rest assured that if you were bothering me, you were really pissing off someone else, cuz they don’t come any easier going than me.
You’re welcome.
