Monday, April 28, 2008

www.whiteville.com

By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff Writer

“I’m tired of punchin’ buttons,” Gregg Lee laughed. “I just want to call ol’ Jefferson back.”

That was the message I received the other day on the voice mail in my office. Gregg and I had played phone tag for a day or two, and I was reaching for my cellphone when Greg called me on the landline. Of course, the ring on the cellphone was actually his message telling me he was calling my landline, and naturally, I missed both calls.

I do not like answering machines or voice mails or number-punching any more than my friend Gregg, yet it seems my life is so entwined with electronic voices that I cannot recall what it’s like to talk to a human being.

And now the danged things are calling me. I am not sure who keeps calling my home phone using an automated dialing computer, because I have never stayed on the line longer than it takes for someone to respond to my question, to wit:

“Are you a real person or are you a machine?”

My wife, bless her, enacted that policy, and it works very well. If you don’t hear a response – at least an indrawn breath that indicates a somewhat taken aback if semi-live human at the other end – then you hang up the telephone. Eventually the companies get the idea, even though they were not quite bright enough to understand the “Do Not Call” registry. But telemarketers are a column for another day.

Whilst I do not like having a conversation with a machine, I will do so if I call someone whose machine has temporarily wrested control of the house, is not coming out, and won’t be taken alive. I’ll also talk to machines which just happen to answer the phone when I call for the machine’s owner.

A fellow churchmember of mine found a rather creative way to deal with both telemarketers and the frustration that comes from plugging in and programming an answering machine. Turns out the one he bought was one of those new politically correct multi-cultural answering machines that has a Spanish switch. Not knowing the machine hablamos espanol, my friend figured to just let the machine’s built-in message voice handle whatever greetings were needed.
Suddenly the telemarketers stopped. Of course, so did everyone else who dialed his number, including people he actually wanted to talk to. They were sure they’d dialed the wrong number – as was I the first time I called him.

And the second.

And the third, which came after calling someone else – another human, not a machine – and ensuring the number I had was correct. So I left a message on the Spanish-speaking machine, thus leading to another question –why, pray tell, do the built-in Spanish greetings feature a sultry (if synthesized) female voice, whilst the English version is a boring, mechanical, Canadian-sounding guy?

Setting up voice mail on a cellphone is something I’ve tried to avoid, with varying degrees of success.

Unfortunately, one of the dogs needed a midnight snack recently, and devoured my phone (yes, it was the night after the bill was paid).

For reasons we won’t worry about here, I couldn’t just swap my number out for a new phone. So I handled it like any man would and took my wife’s phone (actually she pushed it on me, since she hates carrying one worse than I do).

So I had a phone, I had a new number, now I had to come up with a new voicemail greeting.

Since I actually like people, even though I despise telephones, I like for all my numbers to be available; hence, people sometimes call me at work, at home, or on the highway. Sometimes they do all three.

But people still called me on my old phone, which was resting in pieces like a digital chew toy. I know this because once the phone rang while I was trying to retrieve some phone numbers from it. Also, there were several rather odd messages, including one that was nothing but a recording of a conversation between two men about a “project.” As this call was recorded at about 3 a.m. on the night of the crime, all I could figure was that while the dog was eating the phone, she made a few calls first.

Thus leading us to Gregg’s futile attempts to contact me the other day.

He called me at home. No answer but the answering machine, which ironically, features the sounds of several barking dogs after I advise callers how else to contact me.

Then he called me on my old cellphone, which was lying crumpled and crushed. Discovering the new number, which was actually Rhonda’s old number, he called me on that and left me a message that he’d call me on my landline. It was that call – the one on the cellphone – that I was reaching for when the landline rang with his message about punching buttons.

I never did talk directly to Gregg that day; I left him a message on his own cellphone, and figured we’d eventually connect somewhere along the line.

So please, if you’re trying to get up with me, forgive me if I don’t immediately pick up. I might be on the other line, I might be on the other phone, I might not even be where I can pick up a phone (although such places are becoming scarcer than hen’s teeth). Or the dog may have become hungry again.

I promise, if I miss your call, I’ll do my best to call you back; so please, just this once – wait for the beep.