Nov 5, 2002 4 min read

The telephone is a curse and a blessing. I don’t know about you, but nothing gets my goat more than having the phone ring while I’m trying to eat dinner. It seems that is the hour of the day when all the telemarketers fire up their automatic dialers and whammo – I get calls I don’t want.

I have held a fork in mid-air with a morsel of steaming food on it, my palate anticipating the moment of contact, when the phone rings interrupting my pleasure.

“Why don’t you get an answering machine or pay for caller I.D.,’ some may say.

Well, I’m not all that interested in trying to figure out whether or not a phone number in a tiny Caller I.D. display is from friend or foe. As far as answering machines, we had one some years ago but found it more of a nuisance than a help.

However, there are such things as the lesser of two evils.

So I went shopping once more for a telephone answering machine.

I was surprised how the variety had greatly increased while the prices had greatly fallen.

My lovely wife bought our first answering machine as an anniversary gift for me and paid a whopping $80 for it.

It did one thing – answered calls – and that was all. The device contained a tape recorder for which you have to use a miniature cassette tape. In order to listen to your messages you had to rewind the tape. To delete the messages, you had to manually erase the tape.

It was a pain to use.

Technology has obviously made some major strides since then because the machine I bought for slightly less than $20 does just about everything except butter my bread. I can even call home from another telephone and remotely check any messages on the machine.

Not only does it answer callers with a pre-recorded message, but it notes the time, day and date of the message. It does a bunch of other things as well, although I have yet to decipher all the instructions for its use.

Let’s just say I’m happy it handles incoming calls.

The surprising thing, however, is how some of our friends and family have reacted to it.

Each seems to think we bought the machine because he/she was calling too much and we didn’t want to be pestered.

The reason I finally broke down and bought a machine is because one evening, while I was attempting to eat dinner, the phone rang on three separate occasions within a span of about 15 minutes. Each time I had to leave my nice hot food to listen to some sales pitch or take a message for my wife who wasn’t home.

But the recorded messages on the machine for the first couple of days were interesting.

“Oh, when did you get an answering machine Jimmy?’ my sister-in-law intoned in a very surprised voice on the device. “Well, tell your wife to call me. Or I’ll call back. Bye.’ You’ll notice she immediately said it was I who had gotten the device, not her sister (my wife).

My mother called.

“Oh, he has an answering machine. Hello. Hello. Can you hear me?’ Then silence for a moment or two. “Call your mother.’

A friend of my wife’s, who hates answering machines, called several times but refused to leave a message. I heard it ring once but before I could reach the phone she hung up.

It was only later when she got a live person that she confessed she had called several times without leaving a message. I was happy to hear that because I wasn’t sure if the machine was working properly or not.

I don’t know why people should get upset. After all, it’s just a convenience.

Do you suppose it’s the message I put on the machine?

“Hi. It’s Jim. Don’t call me. I’ll call you.’

Just kidding.

Have a good day.

Jim Pletcher is the Herald-Standard’s business editor. E-mail: jpletcher@heraldstandard.com.