ANSWERING MACHINES
Devices with an insatiable appetite for the names, numbers, and times of phone calls.
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Today, recluses get a bad rap. Once, however, there was perfectly good reason never to leave the house: What if someone called?
Sure, when you were home, there was only a light drizzle of telemarketers and wrong numbers. You occasionally checked the dial tone, just to make sure it was still there. But who knew what crazy things would happen if you ventured into the outer realm of people taking part in this thing they called life? The fridge's light might go on even with the door closed; your dog could read Karl Marx. And the phone? It would certainly go berserk. The telephone company would probably cut off your service all together, incredulous that one human being could be so popular. No amount of sunlight could be worth that risk.
In the 1970s, thanks to the invention of call forwarding, when answering services became available to the masses, it was no longer necessary to run to the other side of the house in order not to miss a call (after just having sprinted downstairs to add the fabric softener). If you did miss that call, an operator would pick it up and then relay the message when you phoned in later to check on your popularity level. No, it wasn't cheap to hire a company to answer your incoming calls, but important people had to make such sacrifices.
It was, at last, a way to avoid those long, thin evenings in front of the telly (one doesn't need to go outside in order to be worldly, does one?) without panicking over the possibility of missing a call from a certain suitor. Or Ed McMahon. On occasion, this person might be one and the same.
There was, however, a certain awkwardness to having a third person involved in all of your communiqués. "You'd get to know the people at the service after a while," says Nancy, a sixty-year-old lifelong New Yorker. "I remember getting into these blowout fights with my boyfriend. He'd hang up on me and then I'd call back and the answering service would pick up and I'd find myself yelling at the people at the service, 'Let it ring through! Make him pick up!'" Usually, they'd comply with this kind of request. Almost all the operators were women.
Answering machines had been used by businesses for several decades, but they were not widely available to consumers until the 1980s. They gained popularity as people realized that it was a one-time purchase that amounted to a fraction of the cost of a year of their old service's bills. Phone usage surged in the 80s as people caught on to the idea that you could make the requisite calls to exes and in-laws at odd hours without actually having to speak to anyone, provided they remembered to turn on their machines. By 1988, more than a quarter of all US households had answering machines. "I remember asking one of the women at the answering service if she thought I'd be better off with a machine. She said, 'How am I supposed to respond to that question?'" recalls Nancy.
It was undeniable, however, that answering machines offered an array of features that no service could replicate. In addition to picking up your missed calls, the devices could screen callers. They could also be used to say hello to your parakeet while you were at work. And if you realized you left the oven on, you might call to see if the machine picked up-a good indication that your home had yet to go up in flames.
Some machines required that the outgoing message be at least thirty seconds long in order to give the recording device time to kick in. In order to avoid hang-ups, machine owners went to great lengths to entertain their callers, often using the outgoing message to display their limerick-writing abilities or their Italian vocabulary or to broadcast their favorite Santana tracks. Many used those lengthy seconds to spell out every step of the message-capturing-and-retrieval process. "Hello. Barbara isn't home right now. You have reached her answering machine…" they'd intone, assuaging the caller's fear of reaching Barbara's blender.
The early machine used an audio cassette for the outgoing message and another for the incoming ones. What would sitcom writers have done if it weren't for those little tapes and all the inevitably embarrassing messages they recorded? Fortunately, there were plenty of ways that a message could get lost before you'd have to crawl through the window to retrieve a tape: Sometimes the tapes broke; often they cut off during a message. It wasn't long, however, before these devices begat digital progeny that put no limit on how long an incoming message could be. A mixed blessing, to be sure.
In the 2000s, we use voicemail-if we bother to leave a message at all: Talking requires a level of exertion second only to listening. At least voicemail is dependable enough that you don't have to run in order to avoid losing a call. Actually, the fact that you usually have your phone on your person means that it's hard to miss a call to begin with. Still, that doesn't mean you always want to answer the darn thing-or, for that, matter, be bothered to take the time to listen to your accumulated messages. So, please don't leave your name, number, and the time that you called. Just send a text. Baci, ciao.
