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When John & John (of They Might Be Giants) we’re first getting their start as TMBG, they got publicity by recording songs (or bits thereof) to an answering machine, and then advertising the number in the Village Voice (as a personals ad).
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/
The song in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiYg1jRV2cM
This reminds me of a gag recording I did for missed calls on an early cell phone. Back in those days it wasn't uncommon to get a recorded error message along the lines of "Wireless Provider error 123: explanation of reason you're getting this error". I recorded a message in my best imitation of the error voice that said "Wireless Provider error 427: The wireless customer you're attempting to contact has passed away. Leave a message and we'll be sure to pass it on to their next-of-kin". This message lasted until the first time I missed a call from my mother, who was understandable very upset!
Had a related thing, back when landlines were expensive. A roommate went off on Peace Corps to Sierra Leone for a year, and I inherited her landline.
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.
Answering machine greetings, instant messaging statuses, custom ringtones... My first instinct is that these types of things have gotten less fun over the years, but it's probably just that I'm old and don't know what the fun micro forms of self-expression are for the youth.
Which raises the question: what _are_ the equivalents of the above in 2023?
Don't forget email signatures with "pithy" quotes.
**********************
* "Suck my balls." *
* --Maya Angelou *
**********************
Based on my teenager and her friends, it's mostly collecting enamel pins and stickers. They have a collage of stickers on nearly everything they own and most especially their phone case. The other thing they do is relentlessly curate their Instagram profile, including doing things like posting photos in such a way that they form a triptych or similar on the main profile view.
Based on what I see in the <18s: tchotchkes attached to their phones, bracelets, pin badges (which, to my surprise, my kids are allowed to wear to school), custom avatars, Roblox skins/clothing.
Your custom voicemail prompts are useless because after the prompt, you get another prompt from the system asking you to leave a message after the beep.
I remember having some goofy message for my voicemail when I was in college. Some recruiter left me a voicemail scolding me for being so unprofessional... finally changed it several years later when I upgraded phones.
Custom ringtones on my old Nokia were always fun. I guess I'm old and lame now and just have the standard iPhone ringtone.
With regard to custom ringtones, what happened? It seems to me like Android, in particular, started making it harder and harder to customize. I don't even know if I could set a custom text/ring tone for my wife on my current phone.
One example I can think of is Discord profile pictures and background artwork, custom emoji for their "servers", etc.
You can make any recording a ringtone on an iPhone using GarageBand
https://osxdaily.com/2020/09/11/how-set-song-ringtone-iphone...
For adults, custom car plates, and in some ways the car itself. Custom plates used to be super rare but now very popular in the UK as a form of micro expression.
For teens: gender fluidity including pronouns and ambiguous hair and dress (nope, me neither). Also gamertags and in-game skins.
Are custom navigation prompts still a thing?
Twitter bio maybe?
Instagram bios
Missing George Costanza's answering machine jingle:
"Believe it or not, I'm not home!"
The length and detail of the jingle makes me nostalgic... The prominence of the answering machine and payphones throughout the show are an underappreciated element of the show's cultural millieau! As well as Jerry's desktop computer getting updated every couple of seasons
Special mention for Kramer's "Hello and welcome to Moviefone" imitation:
That was the first one I looked for on this site!
Bad video, it's sped up one half step higher.
Oh man, I never saw that one—must have been during one of the many times in the 90s I didn’t have a tv.
Strangely, this reminds me of another bit of "lost culture": the bathroom book.
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.
I grew up with a handful of "Uncle John's Bathroom Reader" books, thick books with a selection of short essays on varied topics. I learned a lot of trivia from them, largely true.
That's what reddit is for now
This doesn't feel like an archive to me, it feels usable.
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.
Grandpa may have been amused by the fact his son didn't like it.
More questions than answers :)
Why autographs? Are your parents celebrities?
Why VHS rewinders (plural)? One is not enough?
I really enjoyed some of these. Hearing Richard Nixon making fun of his own political disgrace is oddly charming, given the current state of things. And hearing Truman Capote's real voice again sent me down a rabbit hole thinking about how much I miss Philip Seymour Hoffman.
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.
I think those are impersonators though, aren't they? Maybe it's the tape quality but some of those voices don't sound anything like the actual people.
I am reminded of my freshman year of college, which was the first time I had my own voicemail box.
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.
Now I'm curious about your script.
My first job out of college was at Casio in the PhoneMate division. They were the company responsible for commercializing the mass-market answering machine(https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nma...).
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.
We need the Seinfeld answering machine prompt.
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!
Archer voicemail gags were pretty good. "Please leave your message after the air horn"
My dad ran his own business, and I remember his answering machine recording well, because my room was right next to his office at home: "Hi, this is Dennis, I'm sorry that I can't come to the phone right now, but it's a jungle out there, and I'm trying to make a living. So please leave your name [...]"
A friend of mine just informed me about this thread and I had to come in. I've been collecting answering machines for about 12 years now - sharing the best parts of them online at my Tumblr page (https://answerphone.tumblr.com/).
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)
Fantastic, really takes you back.
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.
In college we used the title sequence from The Rockford Files: “This is Jim Rockford. At the tone, leave your name and number. I’ll get back to you.” Followed by the entire two-minute Mike Post theme song. The only message anyone ever left was, “Christ, what a long message!”
Reminds me of this collection of voice messages from the 1980s: https://98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/voices-from-98-bow...
Ctrl+F Archer
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)
This really brings back great memories. From the late 80s to mid 90s a few of my friends and I played games of oneupsmanship with our messages both inbound and outbound. I was (am) a musician and used my DX-7 synth and multitrack cassette recorder to great effect. I obtained a Casio SK-1 at some point and began sampling my friends' greeting messages and chopping them up and using them for mine. Fun times.
In the early nineties (yeah) my answering message was a montage of bits of previous messages I had received (I kept all of them on different tapes, never erased any); word spread and people I didn't know started calling my number just to listen to the message, and sometimes leave funny messages of their own.
I did a couple of variations on this. It did take quite some time to make though, but it was great fun.
Memories of my stoner college friend who would update his voicemail greeting regularly to feature 30sec of obscure, always amazing music.
>For best results, please set your display to 1024x768 screen resolution or higher.
I wasn't expecting wistfulness today.