Archive of novelty answering machine recordings
noveltyansweringmachine.com
noveltyansweringmachine.com
The song “Untitled” (https://tmbw.net/wiki/Untitled) was a recording of two people who called the number, and discussed what they heard.
More info on the original answering machine: https://tmbw.net/wiki/Dial-A-Song
The service is now available, by phone and Internet, here: https://dialasong.com/about/
A telemarketer called asking for her, and I said "oh, she'll be in Africa for a year." The marketer had a minor meltdown. Evidently, he had been close to the end of his rope already, and this (honest) answer pushed him that much closer. "Don't mock me. Just hang up or say she's not taking calls," he begged me.
This is when I finally realized I didn't need to be honest with telemarketers. Subsequently, whenever I'd get a call asking for her, I'd try to come up with more and more exotic reasons she couldn't answer the phone. Since her name was not pronounced the way the spelling suggested it might be, it was easy to know whether the caller knew her or not, and I could respond accordingly.
Which raises the question: what _are_ the equivalents of the above in 2023?
But on the other hand, pins and badges weren't banned when I was in high school either, I distinctly remember at least our resident punks wearing dozens of them on their clothes and backpacks. And pens and pencils and paperclips aren't much less sharp than a typical enamel pin.
I wish they'd reverse course now, though, since almost zero subscribers of any of these big carriers have limited talk minutes.
[1] I believe this is the full exact text that Verizon and AT&T used, verbatim from memory. "Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system. Four... One... Five... Five... Five... Five... Zero... One... Seven... Four... is not available. At the tone, please leave your message. When you are finished recording, hang up, or, press one for more options. To leave a callback number, press seven."
I wonder if this is what actually killed voicemail. Who was going to wait through all that crap to say "Hey it's Steve, wanted to talk to you about X, call me back."
I think it was a Garmin that had this feature, but it may have been a TomTom, i haven't used a separate GPS unit since two got stolen. My new used car has built in GPS, so 100% of my desire to have a stand-alone GPS has vanished.
... It beats the 2000's hell of buying a novelty ringtone for 99p and ending up in some small print recurring charge for a year.
Custom ringtones on my old Nokia were always fun. I guess I'm old and lame now and just have the standard iPhone ringtone.
**********************
* "Suck my balls." *
* --Maya Angelou *
**********************
For teens: gender fluidity including pronouns and ambiguous hair and dress (nope, me neither). Also gamertags and in-game skins.
almost any episode could take place in any time period of nyc... until that computer creeps into frame
My grandma had 3 or 4 in each bathroom, and probably 3 of the books were along the lines of "50 funniest answering machine messages!" On each page it'd give you a script for something like the messages on this site. Pretty good gimmick, you read them, laugh, never actually make a single one.
When I was 16, my parents got a new answering machine. My dad's recording of the message was yelling into the machine "You have reached xxx-xxx-xxxx. Leave a message" It was aggressive. I re-recorded saying, not yelling, "You have reached xxx-xxx-xxxx. We don't sign autographs, but you can leave us a message." He did not like that I re-recorded it. His father, however, loved it for some reason. (never could figure out what Grandpa found funny.)
20+ years later, when my sister got them a new answering machine (yes, you can still get new ones, my parents still have their landline), the message has now changed to "... we don't sign autographs or send texts, but you can leave us a message."
We also buy my dad VHS auto-rewinders whenever we see them at thrift stores.
Why autographs? Are your parents celebrities?
Why VHS rewinders (plural)? One is not enough?
My father uses these to rewind some old VHS tapes he likes to study. They just don't last, is all.
He went through a bunch of VCRs before we were buying the rewinders, though.
Not celebrities, but a little bit of whimsy makes life fun!
As far as rewinders, he has a huge collection of VHS cassettes and VHS decks, but they are all getting old, have already had a long usage when they get to him, and VHS is not a precise medium so not great condition in many cases. The part that usually fails is the motor, and so you have the rewinder to save the motor on the VHS deck. However, the rewinders are also usually low quality and old, and so what happens a lot is that the latches that hold them closed while the rewind fail because they were not great quality plastic (either in composition or design accuracy) that have been subjected to a lot of rattle during their lifetimes and then they break, and it is cheaper/more convenient/fairly environmentally friendly to buy them from thrift stores for ~$3 than to order a ‘new’ $20 one from Amazon/eBay.
Now, this of course leads to a lot more lines of questioning, but I think the answer of ‘because they don’t sign autographs’ is probably sufficient especially since this answer amuses me and is likely to be unseen.
It's funny how others simply do not retain any clues of why they were once funny. Steve Martin's clip is bewildering, for example. Many years ago, I was excited to find an early Robin Williams standup LP from 1980 or so. I remember listening to the whole thing, and getting almost to the end before realizing that I hadn't come close to laughing even once. The audience was laughing like it hurt; combine that with my expectation that Robin Williams is always-on funny, and my brain just sort of waited for the drug to hit without ever getting satisfied.
It's simply true that political comedy ages like fine milk.
Still, I appreciate how a lot of these make me feel. Simpler time!
I wrote a little script for me to follow, and recorded a track of me speaking on my computer. Then, I recorded my voice message with me essentially arguing with myself as the voicemail, as to who was the real me.
It was quite funny - I would usually get 2 voicemails after that: one of a person laughing and hanging up, and one of the person calling back to leave their actual message.
Me1: Hi, this is [Raj]
Me2: Actually, I'm [Raj]
Me1: What, no! I'm [Raj]
(both me's start talking over each other, arguing. I had actual stuff written out, but can't recall it)
Me(?): Anyways - I'm not available at the moment, so please leave a message.
Ah, I see someone already shared a link:
By the time I was hired we were the largest buyer of TMS320 DSPs to use in our digital answering machine devices. We paired them with DRAMs which were QA rejects and used a 3rd party library to map out the bad regions to facilitate shipping a digital recording device in the 90s at consumer friendly prices.
Believe it or not, George isn't at home
Please leave a message, at the beep
I must be out, or I'd pick up the phone
Where could I be?
Believe it or not, I'm not home!
I've also been networking with like minded collectors - like After The Tone (https://afterthetone.com/), Tape Findings (http://www.tapefindings.com/) and Beetlemuse (https://www.youtube.com/@Beetlemuse)
My own voicemail has been degraded to being the "We're sorry, the number you have called has been disconnected" recording on loop to discourage spam calls. It works, but is not great when I'm getting a call from someone I don't know but would find the voicemail useful for.
treasure mine of voicemail gags, ideally just watch but if it's not your thing there are always excerpts on YT (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m_DryY69ciw)
I did a couple of variations on this. It did take quite some time to make though, but it was great fun.
I wasn't expecting wistfulness today.