My 81 year old father is making his annual visit to our house this week. He’s already at my brother’s place (near Cape Cod), so when I needed to return a call to him, I called him on his cell phone. I never call his cell phone - any time I call him, it’s on his landline at his house.
Apparently, he didn’t have the phone turned on, because it went to voicemail on the first ring. It’s a standard greeting: “Hello, you’ve reached xxx, we can’t take your call, please leave a message.” It’s my mother’s voice. My mother died 4 years ago.
Now Dad, I realize you never actually call your own phone, and it’s rare for anyone to call you on it, but for the love of God, and the sanity of your children, erase that greeting and record one of your own. I’ll show you how to do it. Please.
I disagree. One of the things that I liked about calling my MIL’s house was hearing my late FIL’s voice on the answering machine. I smiled a little when I heard it.
My MIL recently changed it (we think at my SIL’s urging) and both Ivylad and my other SIL were upset about it. It was the only way they had left to hear their dad’s voice. Now it’s gone.
YMMV, of course. It’s possible your father forgot, it’s possible he likes to hear your mom’s voice every once in awhile. I wouldn’t press the issue.
My sister is still on my speed dial. She passed away 5 years ago and that phone number has long been someone else’s. I cannot bring myself to delete it.
Leave your Dad alone. I think it would be nice to hear your mother’s voice (although it would be a shock, at first).
ivylass & eleanorigby, I get what you’re saying, but there’s plenty of videos with my mother we can watch if we want to see/hear her. I know my dad has copies of them as well. I really think this is just an oversight on his part.
I’ll be a lot more circumspect when I bring this up with him than I was in my OP.
If it’s your mom’s voice, chances are that your father either doesn’t know how to do it himself or is phobic about recording his voice. Why not offer to switch it out for him?
When I worked at (nameless huge cell phone provider) I took a heart-wrenching call from a woman whose voicemail had been cleared by a system upgrade. For 4 years, she had been saving a certain message every day so as not to lose the last message she received from her daughter before she died. Perhaps your dad likes being able to hear his wife now and then? It might be freaky to you, but some people do like that.
As a side note – the recorded message here was originally the voice of the owner’s sister-in-law, who used to be the COO. She died a few months ago of cancer. A few members of the family did not like hearing her voice when they called, so another recording was made. I preferred hers over the new voice. She had a nice, calm voice whereas the guy they paid to do it is…too fast, and a little grating. A few of the menu options still have her voice. While I am usually squicked out over stuff like that, I donno, I kind of like still hearing her voice once in a while.
My father passed away five years ago. I have his answering machine with his recorded greeting on it. It’s the only recording of his voice I have. I’m not going to erase it. Unless I can find a way to transfer it to my computer.
Let your father keep your mother’s voice on his cell phone if he wants. I can sympathize with him.
Find out what the bypass is to get straight to the beep and use it to skip hearing your mother’s voice whenever you call his cell phone. On some phones it’s the # sign, and on some it’s the *. If he doesn’t know (and I’ll bet he doesn’t), just call his phone and try pressing one or the other of those symbols as soon as the voice mail picks up. If you get a beep, that’s it, and make a note of which one you used for future reference. If you get a voice telling you to “Please enter your password,” it’s the other one.
Good luck.
I miss my babba’s answering machine greeting. She wrote this little poem that went like this. . .
You’ve reached our tape recording,
But please don’t be appalled,
For if we didn’t have it,
We wouldn’t have known you called.
Although we’d love to speak with you,
We can’t come to the phone,
So please leave your name and number
When you hear the little tone.
Thank you kindly, and here is the tone. . .
This is me. I have several people in my contacts that have passed away. I no longer use a paper address book; all are in my contacts in my Treo (which is a combo Palm and phone). It’s not like they can sit in the address book unused, if you delete them electronically they’re GONE. I just can’t do it.
It’s a quirk, I know. I should probably post it in the quirk thread.
A few years after our telecom guy died, his voice was still the default greeting for our department’s shared phone box. I recorded over it after one of his friends (who works here) called and was upset to hear the voice. :smack:
