The Lunatic Fringe

Among the many things that I know my grandkids will never know about…and I’m not even sure my kids will: answering machines.  Yep, those things are going the way of the public pay phones, Border’s bookstores, leaded gas, the Montreal Expos, remembering only the last seven digits of someone’s phone number, and the Postal Service.

Remember the days when, as kids, we’d come home anxious to see if some person-or-other called us while we were out?

Nowadays, when we get a call on our cel phone, the reaction on our faces is something along the lines of:

Oh god, they left a message.  Oh well, I don’t have to listen to it now.  Maybe later, when I know I’ll forget.  I’ll call back eventually, and ask them what they said.  Heck, I wish I could do this in regular conversations with them.  Just ignore them for hours before I respond, and then they’ll have so lost track of what they were saying that they’ll stop boring me.

Of course, the need for answering machines and voicemail are now also going away.  More than a few people I know will get my voicemail, hang up, and then painfully text me a shortened text message with abbreviations and egregious grammatical crimes that takes them three times as long to type as saying it out loud into my voicemail.

I’m just waiting until the day that one of them uses Siri to dictate the text message to their phone, rather than just dictate it into the voicemail box they just hung up on.  Just so the Irony circle can be complete.