I had on the 80s music channel the other night. They played the song "Part Time Lover" by Stevie Wonder. If you don't know (or forgot), the song is about how Stevie is cheating on his woman, who it turns out is also cheating on him. Good song, bad commentary on commitment.I went into stream-of-consciousness mode when I heard the line "And then a man called our exchange but didn't want to leave his name." I thought about how this song was written way before caller id. Back in a time when answering the phone was done blindly (no pun intended), you had no advance warning of who was on the other end.
This led me to think about answering machines. My school partner was over, and I told him what it was like when people first got answering machines. Remember? There was all this pressure to have some kind of humorous message. I'm not sure why that was. Maybe because people weren't used to asking someone to record their voice, and we all wanted to ease the supposed tension.
Recounting this reminded me think of the 80s commercial for that answering machine tape with supposedly "clever" messages on it. I told him about that, too, and of course recounted (in song) the ridiculous messages you could buy.
I'm not sure if he didn't believe me or wanted to make me laugh, but he immediately grabbed the commercial from youtube. Sure enough, I had 3 or 4 of the messages close to perfect. I laughed so hard that my stomach hurt.
Hope you like it at least 10% as much as I did. And 10 points to everyone who knows why I put the picture at the top of this post.
