For any of you who have called my home number in the past 1 1/2 years that we've lived in our house and have never had any acknowledgement from either me or Dave, I want you to know that we've finally gotten an answering machine that we know how to check. We used to have voicemail service before, which we did know how to check, but we had just forgotten the phone number we were supposed to dial. Yes, yes, I know we could have programed the VM number into our speed dial or something, but that would be too easy now, wouldn't it?

I think in the time that we had the voicemail, I checked it a total of 3 times. After that, we just forgot about it. We rarely gave out our home phone number anyway. The thing that sucks about voice mail service is that there's really no way to know that you have messages unless you call it. Ignorance is bliss, so we never called it.

One day about 9 months ago, when I had nothing else to do, I checked the voicemail. I went through about 50 messages or some insane number like that. Seventy percent of those were Dave's parents wondering where we were (they like to check up on us, like, every day), some were reminders for appointments, some were from my family, several were from a friend that Dave had called to ask advice about a projector, which was really funny, because Dave was pissed that he never heard from him, and lo and behold, our friend had tried so hard to get a hold of us! After realizing how many calls we were missing, I decided to just get an answering machine. That instant notification as soon as we walk through the door and seeing a message button light up would be worth it.

So I got an answering machine/phone combo, plugged it in, made a short and sweet recording to leave us a message, and went on with life.

The phone worked great. I used it for work all the time, since it had a speakerphone function. The old phone was moved upstairs to the office, which helped out a lot since we didn't have a phone in there.

But as time went on, no messages.

I really didn't think much of it. I just thought that people got sick of leaving us messages back in the voicemail days that they no longer wanted to leave us messages.

Then this who snafu happened with the doctors office when I showed up for an appointment that they had cancelled, and told me that the left several messages on my home phone telling me so (I had been out traveling, so I wouldn't have been home to get them anyway). I went home and asked Dave if he'd gotten any messages, and he said no. Seems that he wasn't curious that in the 7 months we had the machine we never got any messages.

I checked the dreaded voicemail (which I had forgotten to cancel), and there were the messages, along with 30 others!

What was going on? Why wasn't our new fancy phone picking up the new messages? I had set the ringer pickup to 4 rings, I seemed to have checked everything, and still, it didn't work.

Of course, I didn't read the manual. No, no, no, my friends, I'm too cool and too smart for that. Seriously, if you asked me where the manual was, I wouldn't know, I'd maybe point in the general direction of my kitchen, where most manuals end up anyway.

After a lot of tinkering and a lot of frustration, my eyes saw a button that I had never seen before, but which was so obvious, so blatant, that I had wondered why I had never seen it before.

What button was it?

"On/Off"

What the--?!?!

There's an on/off switch for this little fucker?

Wait, wait, wait, the phone works, I'm able to make a recording and set the number of rings, everything else seems to function...doesn't that mean that this thing is on already?

Well, the evidence proved NO, since when I hit that little on/off switch, it lit up all nice and green.

Imagine that! I never turned ON the answering machine!

After that, we started getting messages. We surprised people when they left a message and we called back stating, "Yeah, we got your message and..." We feel all grown up now.

The only thing is, our answering machine still has that robotic 'Please. Leave. A. Message." voice....I guess when I made my recordings before it didn't take. But I'm too lazy to change it, so for the time being, we're gonna take little steps and take this answering machine business slow...

So leave us a message. We'll call back this time!

Posted by Yano at January 25, 2006 09:17 AM

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