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Archive of novelty answering machine recordings
- dustincoates 3y agoAnswering machine greetings, instant messaging statuses, custom ringtones... My first instinct is that these types of things have gotten less fun over the years, but it's probably just that I'm old and don't know what the fun micro forms of self-expression are for the youth. Which raises the question: what _are_ the equivalents of the above in 2023?
- gdprrrr 3y agoTwitter bio maybe?
- angst_ridden 3y agoNot T̶w̶i̶t̶t̶e̶r̶. Not X. Tik-tok maybe?
- dhosek 3y agoI usually update my Twitter bio on a monthly basis. Only once has anyone commented on the humor but it’s entertaining for me.
- petercooper 3y agoBased on what I see in the <18s: tchotchkes attached to their phones, bracelets, pin badges (which, to my surprise, my kids are allowed to wear to school), custom avatars, Roblox skins/clothing.
- giantg2 3y agoWhy is it surprising they can wear pins to school? Public schools are required to allow speech in most forms, like messages on clothing.
- xp84 3y agoProbably just the pointy part. I certainly wouldn't put it past kids to use any sharp object for bullying purposes. But on the other hand, pins and badges weren't banned when I was in high school either, I distinctly remember at least our resident punks wearing dozens of them on their clothes and backpacks. And pens and pencils and paperclips aren't much less sharp than a typical enamel pin.
- petercooper 3y agoI failed to give the context behind that statement. I live in the UK where school uniform is universal in secondary/high school, strongly enforced, and considered to be very important for some reason (enough so that breaching the uniform rules can result in being segregated from the other students for the day). They seem to allow a little more of a personal touch now than in my day, though, and can wear buttons on their blazers as well as hair accessories.
- giantg2 3y agoAh, ok. Many private schools are similar to that in the US.
- irrational 3y agoAdd in swatch watches and all of that sounds like my peers and I in school in the 80s.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago"The time was 6 o'clock on the Swatch watch/gotta date/can't be late..."
- Dwedit 3y agoYour custom voicemail prompts are useless because after the prompt, you get another prompt from the system asking you to leave a message after the beep.
- xp84 3y agoI read confirmation somewhere that the origin of this idiotic practice, including the absurdly verbose script they use[1], was to waste people's airtime. And it sure seemed to be true, because some carriers literally went to the trouble, even as late as the 2010s, to modify their voicemail systems to remove the option that used to be there to omit the boilerplate language. Plus, if you had any goal besides wasting people's time, why would you coin the phrase "an automated voice messaging system"? I wish they'd reverse course now, though, since almost zero subscribers of any of these big carriers have limited talk minutes. [1] I believe this is the full exact text that Verizon and AT&T used, verbatim from memory. "Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system. Four... One... Five... Five... Five... Five... Zero... One... Seven... Four... is not available. At the tone, please leave your message. When you are finished recording, hang up, or, press one for more options. To leave a callback number, press seven." I wonder if this is what actually killed voicemail. Who was going to wait through all that crap to say "Hey it's Steve, wanted to talk to you about X, call me back."
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoApparently my mom!
- kotaKat 3y agoThe old trick back in the day was "one-star-pound" - one of the three would often skip the recording and dump you right to the beep based on what carrier's VMB it was.
- washadjeffmad 3y agoNot if you host your own PBX!
- gpvos 3y agoAre custom navigation prompts still a thing?
- genewitch 3y agofor example: https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/snoop-dogg-gps https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/snoop-dogg-gps I think it was a Garmin that had this feature, but it may have been a TomTom, i haven't used a separate GPS unit since two got stolen. My new used car has built in GPS, so 100% of my desire to have a stand-alone GPS has vanished.
- tristor 3y agoBased on my teenager and her friends, it's mostly collecting enamel pins and stickers. They have a collage of stickers on nearly everything they own and most especially their phone case. The other thing they do is relentlessly curate their Instagram profile, including doing things like posting photos in such a way that they form a triptych or similar on the main profile view.
- smolder 3y agoOne example I can think of is Discord profile pictures and background artwork, custom emoji for their "servers", etc.
- whall6 3y agoInstagram bios
- dabluecaboose 3y agoWith regard to custom ringtones, what happened? It seems to me like Android, in particular, started making it harder and harder to customize. I don't even know if I could set a custom text/ring tone for my wife on my current phone.
- OliveMate 3y agoIf you have an mp3 file of what you wish to be a ringtone, could can put it on the phone and open it in the file manager or music app of your choice, press the ⋮ options button and there should be an option to set it as a ringtone. ... It beats the 2000's hell of buying a novelty ringtone for 99p and ending up in some small print recurring charge for a year.
- justjash 3y agoI remember having some goofy message for my voicemail when I was in college. Some recruiter left me a voicemail scolding me for being so unprofessional... finally changed it several years later when I upgraded phones. Custom ringtones on my old Nokia were always fun. I guess I'm old and lame now and just have the standard iPhone ringtone.
- FuriouslyAdrift 3y agoYou can make any recording a ringtone on an iPhone using GarageBand https://osxdaily.com/2020/09/11/how-set-song-ringtone-iphone-garageband/ https://osxdaily.com/2020/09/11/how-set-song-ringtone-iphone...
- rdiddly 3y agoDon't forget email signatures with "pithy" quotes. ********************** * "Suck my balls." * * --Maya Angelou * ********************** Thing is, there's a firehose of self-expression modes available now. Maybe "micro forms of self-expression" were more important back then because they were the only, or one of the few, ways of doing it. Whereas now maybe they're mostly no longer needed? I dunno. Asserted for discussion without supporting material.
- walthamstow 3y agoFor adults, custom car plates, and in some ways the car itself. Custom plates used to be super rare but now very popular in the UK as a form of micro expression. For teens: gender fluidity including pronouns and ambiguous hair and dress (nope, me neither). Also gamertags and in-game skins.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Dwedit 3y agoWe need the Seinfeld answering machine prompt.
- jlev 3y agoBelieve it or not, George isn't at home Please leave a message, at the beep I must be out, or I'd pick up the phone Where could I be? Believe it or not, I'm not home! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrkKvk2Lrjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrkKvk2Lrjw
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jolt42 3y agoI figured this was a comment somewhere! Can I use AI to create the song with my name?
- dhosek 3y agoYou need to sing it yourself. That’s half the charm/humor.
- cool_dude85 3y agoStrangely, this reminds me of another bit of "lost culture": the bathroom book. My grandma had 3 or 4 in each bathroom, and probably 3 of the books were along the lines of "50 funniest answering machine messages!" On each page it'd give you a script for something like the messages on this site. Pretty good gimmick, you read them, laugh, never actually make a single one.
- morkalork 3y agoThat's what reddit is for now
- kevinmchugh 3y agoI grew up with a handful of "Uncle John's Bathroom Reader" books, thick books with a selection of short essays on varied topics. I learned a lot of trivia from them, largely true.
- InvaderFizz 3y agoFantastic, really takes you back. My own voicemail has been degraded to being the "We're sorry, the number you have called has been disconnected" recording on loop to discourage spam calls. It works, but is not great when I'm getting a call from someone I don't know but would find the voicemail useful for.
- russnewcomer 3y agoThis doesn't feel like an archive to me, it feels usable. When I was 16, my parents got a new answering machine. My dad's recording of the message was yelling into the machine "You have reached xxx-xxx-xxxx. Leave a message" It was aggressive. I re-recorded saying, not yelling, "You have reached xxx-xxx-xxxx. We don't sign autographs, but you can leave us a message." He did not like that I re-recorded it. His father, however, loved it for some reason. (never could figure out what Grandpa found funny.) 20+ years later, when my sister got them a new answering machine (yes, you can still get new ones, my parents still have their landline), the message has now changed to "... we don't sign autographs or send texts, but you can leave us a message." We also buy my dad VHS auto-rewinders whenever we see them at thrift stores.
- albert_e 3y agoMore questions than answers :) Why autographs? Are your parents celebrities? Why VHS rewinders (plural)? One is not enough?
- monknomo 3y agoI think the joke is that his parents are not celebrities, and so they don't need to specify that they don't sign autographs
- qup 3y ago> Why VHS rewinders (plural)? One is not enough? My father uses these to rewind some old VHS tapes he likes to study. They just don't last, is all. He went through a bunch of VCRs before we were buying the rewinders, though.
- russnewcomer 3y ago:) Not celebrities, but a little bit of whimsy makes life fun! As far as rewinders, he has a huge collection of VHS cassettes and VHS decks, but they are all getting old, have already had a long usage when they get to him, and VHS is not a precise medium so not great condition in many cases. The part that usually fails is the motor, and so you have the rewinder to save the motor on the VHS deck. However, the rewinders are also usually low quality and old, and so what happens a lot is that the latches that hold them closed while the rewind fail because they were not great quality plastic (either in composition or design accuracy) that have been subjected to a lot of rattle during their lifetimes and then they break, and it is cheaper/more convenient/fairly environmentally friendly to buy them from thrift stores for ~$3 than to order a ‘new’ $20 one from Amazon/eBay. Now, this of course leads to a lot more lines of questioning, but I think the answer of ‘because they don’t sign autographs’ is probably sufficient especially since this answer amuses me and is likely to be unseen.
- denvaar 3y agoMy dad ran his own business, and I remember his answering machine recording well, because my room was right next to his office at home: "Hi, this is Dennis, I'm sorry that I can't come to the phone right now, but it's a jungle out there, and I'm trying to make a living. So please leave your name [...]"
- RajT88 3y agoI am reminded of my freshman year of college, which was the first time I had my own voicemail box. I wrote a little script for me to follow, and recorded a track of me speaking on my computer. Then, I recorded my voice message with me essentially arguing with myself as the voicemail, as to who was the real me. It was quite funny - I would usually get 2 voicemails after that: one of a person laughing and hanging up, and one of the person calling back to leave their actual message.
- zote 3y agoNow I'm curious about your script.
- RajT88 3y agoIt was something along the lines of: Me1: Hi, this is [Raj] Me2: Actually, I'm [Raj] Me1: What, no! I'm [Raj] (both me's start talking over each other, arguing. I had actual stuff written out, but can't recall it) Me(?): Anyways - I'm not available at the moment, so please leave a message.
- macintux 3y agoThe animated show Archer prominently features the titular character recording absurd, confusing voicemail messages designed to mislead the caller into believing he has answered the phone, and the inevitable mixups when people actually reach him. Ah, I see someone already shared a link: https://youtu.be/k5kIVXNCzDA https://youtu.be/k5kIVXNCzDA
- CaliforniaKarl 3y agoWhen John & John (of They Might Be Giants) we’re first getting their start as TMBG, they got publicity by recording songs (or bits thereof) to an answering machine, and then advertising the number in the Village Voice (as a personals ad). The song “Untitled” (https://tmbw.net/wiki/Untitled https://tmbw.net/wiki/Untitled) was a recording of two people who called the number, and discussed what they heard. More info on the original answering machine: https://tmbw.net/wiki/Dial-A-Song https://tmbw.net/wiki/Dial-A-Song The service is now available, by phone and Internet, here: https://dialasong.com/about/ https://dialasong.com/about/
- ufo 3y agoThe song in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiYg1jRV2cM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiYg1jRV2cM
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- biagidp 3y agoThis reminds me of a gag recording I did for missed calls on an early cell phone. Back in those days it wasn't uncommon to get a recorded error message along the lines of "Wireless Provider error 123: explanation of reason you're getting this error". I recorded a message in my best imitation of the error voice that said "Wireless Provider error 427: The wireless customer you're attempting to contact has passed away. Leave a message and we'll be sure to pass it on to their next-of-kin". This message lasted until the first time I missed a call from my mother, who was understandable very upset!
- angst_ridden 3y agoHad a related thing, back when landlines were expensive. A roommate went off on Peace Corps to Sierra Leone for a year, and I inherited her landline. A telemarketer called asking for her, and I said "oh, she'll be in Africa for a year." The marketer had a minor meltdown. Evidently, he had been close to the end of his rope already, and this (honest) answer pushed him that much closer. "Don't mock me. Just hang up or say she's not taking calls," he begged me. This is when I finally realized I didn't need to be honest with telemarketers. Subsequently, whenever I'd get a call asking for her, I'd try to come up with more and more exotic reasons she couldn't answer the phone. Since her name was not pronounced the way the spelling suggested it might be, it was easy to know whether the caller knew her or not, and I could respond accordingly.
- droptablemain 3y agoMissing George Costanza's answering machine jingle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ria37d9mInY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ria37d9mInY
- treypitt 3y ago"Believe it or not, I'm not home!" The length and detail of the jingle makes me nostalgic... The prominence of the answering machine and payphones throughout the show are an underappreciated element of the show's cultural millieau! As well as Jerry's desktop computer getting updated every couple of seasons
- jareklupinski 3y agothat computer is the only marker of time in that show to me almost any episode could take place in any time period of nyc... until that computer creeps into frame
- dhosek 3y agoOh man, I never saw that one—must have been during one of the many times in the 90s I didn’t have a tv.
- js2 3y agoSpecial mention for Kramer's "Hello and welcome to Moviefone" imitation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM79_itR0Nc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM79_itR0Nc
- miked85 3y agoThat was the first one I looked for on this site!
- Dwedit 3y agoBad video, it's sped up one half step higher.
- damnesian 3y agoThis really brings back great memories. From the late 80s to mid 90s a few of my friends and I played games of oneupsmanship with our messages both inbound and outbound. I was (am) a musician and used my DX-7 synth and multitrack cassette recorder to great effect. I obtained a Casio SK-1 at some point and began sampling my friends' greeting messages and chopping them up and using them for mine. Fun times.
- mwcremer 3y agoIn college we used the title sequence from The Rockford Files: “This is Jim Rockford. At the tone, leave your name and number. I’ll get back to you.” Followed by the entire two-minute Mike Post theme song. The only message anyone ever left was, “Christ, what a long message!”
- suzzer99 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg1Cx26-928 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg1Cx26-928
- 01100011 3y agoMy first job out of college was at Casio in the PhoneMate division. They were the company responsible for commercializing the mass-market answering machine(https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1292439 https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nma...). By the time I was hired we were the largest buyer of TMS320 DSPs to use in our digital answering machine devices. We paired them with DRAMs which were QA rejects and used a 3rd party library to map out the bad regions to facilitate shipping a digital recording device in the 90s at consumer friendly prices.
- lazycog512 3y agoArcher voicemail gags were pretty good. "Please leave your message after the air horn"
- CharlesW 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5kIVXNCzDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5kIVXNCzDA
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- subpixel 3y agoMemories of my stoner college friend who would update his voicemail greeting regularly to feature 30sec of obscure, always amazing music.
- kouru225 3y agoReminds me of this collection of voice messages from the 1980s: https://98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/voices-from-98-bowery https://98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/voices-from-98-bow...
- throwaway290 3y agoCtrl+F Archer treasure mine of voicemail gags, ideally just watch but if it's not your thing there are always excerpts on YT (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m_DryY69ciw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m_DryY69ciw)
- bambax 3y agoIn the early nineties (yeah) my answering message was a montage of bits of previous messages I had received (I kept all of them on different tapes, never erased any); word spread and people I didn't know started calling my number just to listen to the message, and sometimes leave funny messages of their own. I did a couple of variations on this. It did take quite some time to make though, but it was great fun.
- petecooper 3y ago>For best results, please set your display to 1024x768 screen resolution or higher. I wasn't expecting wistfulness today.
- peteforde 3y agoI really enjoyed some of these. Hearing Richard Nixon making fun of his own political disgrace is oddly charming, given the current state of things. And hearing Truman Capote's real voice again sent me down a rabbit hole thinking about how much I miss Philip Seymour Hoffman. It's funny how others simply do not retain any clues of why they were once funny. Steve Martin's clip is bewildering, for example. Many years ago, I was excited to find an early Robin Williams standup LP from 1980 or so. I remember listening to the whole thing, and getting almost to the end before realizing that I hadn't come close to laughing even once. The audience was laughing like it hurt; combine that with my expectation that Robin Williams is always-on funny, and my brain just sort of waited for the drug to hit without ever getting satisfied. It's simply true that political comedy ages like fine milk.
- tunesmith 3y agoI think those are impersonators though, aren't they? Maybe it's the tape quality but some of those voices don't sound anything like the actual people.
- version_five 3y agoI'd say the fact that Popeye has one is a dead giveaway
- jtbayly 3y agoI assumed they were impersonations. But if they aren’t, it could be the real person who did the popeye voice, so not a giveaway after all.
- peteforde 3y agoI'm only half embarrassed that this somehow didn't occur to me. My initial read was that there's probably some personalities who would have gotten a kick out of recording a message... but it (sadly) doesn't make a lot of sense that Richard Nixon would make fun of himself in such a casual way. Still, I appreciate how a lot of these make me feel. Simpler time!
- HeWhoWantsJeans 3y agoA friend of mine just informed me about this thread and I had to come in. I've been collecting answering machines for about 12 years now - sharing the best parts of them online at my Tumblr page (https://answerphone.tumblr.com/ https://answerphone.tumblr.com/). I've also been networking with like minded collectors - like After The Tone (https://afterthetone.com/ https://afterthetone.com/), Tape Findings (http://www.tapefindings.com/ http://www.tapefindings.com/) and Beetlemuse (https://www.youtube.com/@Beetlemuse https://www.youtube.com/@Beetlemuse)