Weekend Edition
They don't pay me enough to blog on the weekend, but I had to come in to the office anyway to do the rough ad layout, so I might as well post something.
Esp. since I'm enjoying the yoga of blogging, the daily practice, as the poets would have it.
It reminds me of my first answering machine.
Before there was a machine, in the early seventies, there was your "service." This was a real person who answered when you didn't pick up and whom you could call at any time to collect your messages. It was extremely humiliating to call in at the end of the day and be told, "You're all clear, Mr. Junker," the implication being that nobody would ever want to call you anyway.
So the machine was esteem-boosting, or, at least, it wasn't so esteem-destroying.
I used to change my message every day. I would try to be clever, of course. When I launched a particularly good one, friends would tell friends. Whole offices would call in.
And hang up without leaving a message.
Sometimes I'd come home at the end of the day and hear nothing but the click of their hang-ups.
At the time, I was teaching at a sleazy prep school and going to USF to get my master's in private school administration. (I wanted to be a headmaster.) There was an on-campus litmag running a fiction contest. Reader, I entered and won, with a story modeled on Kafka's "The Hunger Artist." Mine was called "The Answering Machine Artist."
[Here's a zyzzyva for Technorati to find; hopefully this time without my having to ping them.]
Esp. since I'm enjoying the yoga of blogging, the daily practice, as the poets would have it.
It reminds me of my first answering machine.
Before there was a machine, in the early seventies, there was your "service." This was a real person who answered when you didn't pick up and whom you could call at any time to collect your messages. It was extremely humiliating to call in at the end of the day and be told, "You're all clear, Mr. Junker," the implication being that nobody would ever want to call you anyway.
So the machine was esteem-boosting, or, at least, it wasn't so esteem-destroying.
I used to change my message every day. I would try to be clever, of course. When I launched a particularly good one, friends would tell friends. Whole offices would call in.
And hang up without leaving a message.
Sometimes I'd come home at the end of the day and hear nothing but the click of their hang-ups.
At the time, I was teaching at a sleazy prep school and going to USF to get my master's in private school administration. (I wanted to be a headmaster.) There was an on-campus litmag running a fiction contest. Reader, I entered and won, with a story modeled on Kafka's "The Hunger Artist." Mine was called "The Answering Machine Artist."
[Here's a zyzzyva for Technorati to find; hopefully this time without my having to ping them.]
posted by Howard Junker at 1:52 AM
2 Comments:
here's one for you, for I too have checked in just to read..
*dead air*
*hangs up*
now there are all kinds of substitutes for the answering machine: email, evites, blogs...thanks, howard, for giving me one more thing to check compulsively.
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