This actually made me tear up a little bit. My Dad always answer the the phone like this. He died in October at age 97.
My ex- Brother-in-Law always answers the phone with the “meellloooww”. Drives me nuts. Just sounds like he’s too frickin lazy to properly form the word Hello.
A large local business when I was growing up was Gainers meat packing plant, which underwent huge labour and strike issues in the mid-1980’s. Nasty stuff with police union busting and beating the heck out of scabs.
As a smart assed kid, I used to occasionally answer the phone “Gainers. What’s your beef?”
My then-boyfriend’s friend used to answer our phone with “House of Lords, God speaking” - it was usually my mom who would say “Listen God, I need to talk to you about my daughter…”
Because of my stroke, I can’t quite say “hello” unless I stop and slowly think it out so most of the time it comes out pure and simple “yellow”. To the point that some friends respond “blue” or something like that just to tweak me.
When I’m trying to be funny, it’s “Ralph’s Pornateria and Love Sheep Supply - can I help you?”
It worked for Bugs Bunny, but when I tried the person on the other end had no idea what I was talking about.
When I call my brother, he answers with a bored-sounding “hello”. I say “hi, it’s Eric”, and he replies with the exact same bored-sounding “hello”. It drives me nuts; it’s exactly what a person would say if they hadn’t heard me.
Didn’t work out well. First Sergeant didn’t speak Klingon. Figures I’d get stuck trying a geekly phone greeting on one of the only non-geeks in a very technical/scientific military organization.
Thankfully, it didn’t completely throttle my military career in its cradle. Shirt wasn’t nearly as hard-assed as the rep he cultivated.
I had a supervisor (circa mid-1980’s) whose voice-mail greeting began:
You have reached the desk of [name]. Don’t you feel silly talking to a desk? . . .
I knew a guy who would answer any phone by saying his last name. So he would pick up the phone and say, “Johnson!” (not his real last name). I always thought it was weird. Especially in the era before Cell phones. Weirder still, his last name wasn’t all that common so if you didn’t know who you were calling it would sound like someone just shouted a nonsense word at you.