At the Sound of the Beep

By Jim Hagarty
1988

It’s strange what things in an affluent society a man will come to think he requires.

First, he has to have a telephone in his kitchen so he can be in frequent communication with vacuum-cleaner hawkers, magazine pedlars and people conducting opinion polls. Next, he needs another telephone to put on his bedside table so he can answer 2 a.m. calls from inebriates wanting to order pizzas. Then he has to have a third machine to answer the calls that come in on the first two machines when he’s not home, so he’ll never again miss out on a chance for some quick and easy aggravation.

Some sort of important line is crossed when a man buys a telephone-answering device. It’s a declaration on his part that all his previous half-hearted attempts to bring perfect order into his world are over and that he’s now serious about whipping the chaos into a system.

I crossed that line last week when, on impulse, I put down 160 hard-earned dollars on a counter and walked out of a store with a sleek little apparatus that has already changed my life. There can be no going back.

When I had the machine hooked up, I thought about what kind of message I’d record on it so that my true personality would shine through without scaring people off.

“Hi! This is Jim. I’m outside washing bird dung off the back of my house right now and can’t come to the phone so if you wouldn’t mind leaving me a message at the sound of the beep.”

I played it back. It was accurate. A couple of condors, I guess, had done a fly past and scored several direct hits. But it lacked a certain sophistication.

“Hi! This is Jim. I’m in the middle of a big argument with my cats right now but if you’ll leave me a message…”

Too tacky, I decided, and self-revealing. And I don’t need any animal-rights activists banging on my door.

I toyed with, “What the heck do you want?” but decided it was too direct. I ended up, instead, with a very plain and simple statement. It’s me.

It was 10 p.m. by the time my machine was ready to go. I sat there in front of it until almost 1 a.m. No one called.

No one called all the next day.

The following day, no one called again but at least the number of messages hadn’t dropped from the day before. I finally decided the darned thing probably needed to be primed like an old hand water pump so I got three people from work to call and leave me messages.

It worked. The next morning, an uncle called. I congratulated him on being the first official caller to leave a message.

“What do I win?” he asked.

“A year’s free groceries,” I replied.

The thing’s been crammed full of messages since then. Saturday night, I gave my sister a lengthy explanation of the wonders of my new machine.

“Say, for example, I’m at work, and I want to leave a message at home for my friend,” I beamed. “All I have to do is phone home and record the message I want to leave him on the special memo part of the machine. Then, when he phones my place, all he does is press three secret numbers only he has and then the machine automatically plays him the message I left him.”

She looked at me with some disdain. What should I expect from a person whose phone is still on a party line?

“Had you never thought of just calling your friend directly and giving him your message personally?” she asked.

Some people have no imagination. No sense of adventure.

No interest in science.

Author: Jim Hagarty

I am a 72-year-old retired journalist, busy recovering from a lifelong career as an unretired journalist. This year marks a half century of my scratching out little fables about life. My interests include genealogy, humour and music. I live in a little blue shack in Canada and spend most of my time trying to stay out of trouble. I am not that good at it. I also spent years teaching journalism. Poor state of journalism today: My fault. I have a family I don't deserve, a dog that adores me, and two cars the junk yard refuses to accept. My prized possessions include my old guitar and a razor my Dad gave me when I was 14 and which I still use when I bother to shave. Oh, and my great-great-grandfather's blackthorn stick he brought from Ireland in the 1850s. I have only one opinion but it is a good one: People take too many showers.