When I was living in a 6 bedroom apartment on oceanside Del Playa in Isla Vista, my friend calls me up to tell me that he has tickets to go and see Bruce Springsteen and would I like to go. Somehow, I never got the message. I am still pissed to this day, and still have never seen “The Boss” in concert. I like to think this was in 1985 during the Born in the USA tour, but I could be mistaken.
What is the most important phone message, email or other communication that you have missed?
Our kids are still young, so we don’t usually bother to make sure we can hear any late night phone calls coming in. Last year, my father was hospitalized with a type of toxic shock and they weren’t sure he was going to make it through the next few hours. The night it happened my mother tried to reach us at around 3 a.m. and we didn’t have the phones on. Fortunately she was able to reach a friend who lived close by and she came around to roust us out of bed.
Dad is doing pretty well now.
I eventually got the message, so I’m not sure if it’s too relevant …
One day, my roommate at the time mentioned that I had a message on our voicemail so I went and checked it. He was right. It was Blockbuster, telling me that they never received a movie I returned. Oh, and the message was three weeks old. Yeah, thanks, roommate.
Incidentally, I HAD returned it, they just misplaced it.
My husband nearly missed numerous messages (he later said he had called SIX TIMES that afternoon!) from the dean of admissions of his law school due to an asshole housemate (no longer with us). We only found out about it because we walked into the house as asshole housemate was listening to the message with his finger on delete.
Not a missed call, but I nearly hung up on a prospective employer because I needed to pee.
The booking agent for the Kids In The Hall left a voicemail for me at the student newspaper I worked for (1989 or 1990) to tell me that I **could ** interview them briefly after their show the next night in downtown Detroit, I just needed to call her back to schedule. Too bad the editor of said student paper had a blow out fight that day with his second-in-command over sleeping with the girlfriend of said second-in-command, and had changed the voicemail password so the messages couldn’t be erased vindictively. I got her message two days after the Kids left town. Thank you Eric, for pooping where you chew and dragging others down with you. You’re lucky Rob blamed Jennifer more than you.
I did eventually meet the Kids In The Hall, but still…sucked at the time.
Once when my mom was going through an especially crazy period I’d turned the ringer off so I wouldn’t have to argue with her; my boyfriend checked the messages the mext morning and said “you don’t want to hear this, and I’m deleting them, but you better call your aunt Joan.”
One message form my mom explaining that she loves us all very much, and she just wanted us to know, click, and a second message from my aunt about having received disturbing calls from my mom, and she and an uncle going in a jiffy to my mom’s town and getting her to the hospital in time after having gobbled handfuls of pills, and sticking her in a psych ward for a few days. . . ugh. So I only had to hear it second-hand, which probably helps me sleep to this day.
(she’s fine now. Menopause is crazy)
By the way, I saw IV and DP in the OP in mouseover and cracked up (ex-UCSB grad student)
Mine is pretty mundane and not that important, but I never got three messages from a professor who was calling about my final project. I had missed class that day (my wife was in the hospital) and emailed him about it, but in the hospital testing room we had to turn the phones off (due to equipment I guess - normally it’s just a sign, but the doc specifically asked us this time) and he was worried because he hadn’t heard from me. Apparently, school-wide email was down, but from my non-university account, it seemed to go through fine. My phone showed no messages when I turned it back on, but 3 hours later it showed messages, so I listened to them. I called the professor back right away and met him in town to drop off my paper (he was leaving town and wanted to be sure he got it) - I ended up with an A…
Brendon Small
I intentionally didn’t answer the phone with my aunt’s name showed up on the Caller ID about a month ago. I didn’t want to deal with her self inflictedCrisis du Jour at the time.
Turned out that that day’s Crisis du Jour was my grandmother who had to be rushed to the hospital due to blood clots in her lungs. The doctor told her later that it was pretty touch and go for a while.
Back in the day when I was a freelance stagehand in the NYC area, I prided myself on never missing a gig even though I didn’t carry around a pager (what? nobody had cell phones yet!) There was this one day when I was on a job and during a break I checked my messages on my home phone (you remember- dial in and type in your code…). Anyway, the message was to fill in as a crew member for that night’s Nirvana show on MTV Unplugged, but call back immediately as there were only a few spots left. I immediately called back to accept and was told that the last spot had just been filled. Just, as in 5 minutes before. I offered to work the gig for free but MTV limited the crew size to critical personnel only.
Cobain took his life just a couple months later, and I think the Unplugged gig was their last live show.
Grrr.
You can imagine my surprise when I picked up the telephone and my father said, “We buried Mama today - where were you?”
My grandmother had died four days before and I never got the messages they had left with my room mate.
You could say I was a little miffed.
One night I was home alone, and I hate answering the phone, and it kept ringing, but no one was leaving a message.
This was in the days before caller ID.
Anyway, there was a knock at my door, and it was my neighbor. My parents called him to tell him to tell me my grandmother had died. In retrospect, no biggie. At least I didn’t miss the funeral. Sheesh.
Can’t really argue with some of the above but back in early 1994 Lady Chance and I organized a ‘Save Brisco County’ write in campaign. We had people writing to Fox as well as their top 10 advertisers. It was fun.
We came home from grocery shopping one day to find a message from Bruce Campbell on our machine saying his agent had plugged him in to what we were doing and that he appreciated all the hard work and he hoped it worked so he could keep getting paid. He went on at some length.
I still have the tape someplace. Man, what a miss! I brought it up with him several years later at E3 when I was media and he was promoting the ‘Pocketful of Boomstick’ game. He claimed he remembered but I didn’t push him on it.
So you guys snuffed him for his transgressions? 
Probably the phone call from a major publishing house saying they wanted to publish my novel, already had a million-dollar deal for the film rights and were willing to pay a half-million dollar advance on the sequel. But I’ll never know because … well, I missed the call.
Oh well, in that case it was Goran Visnjic calling to ask for my hand in marriage.
So was the housemate being actively hostile, or just extraordinarily stupid?
On my hitchhiking trip from Ontario to BC and back in 1976, I stopped in Saskatoon, SK to see some relatives. While I was there, I visited CKOM radio, and did a demo tape for them. Fast forward to after I’d been home for most of a year, and I learned that they’d called my grandmother’s number trying to find me, to offer me a job.
What a shame – I would have granted it! You’d make a cute couple.
My jerk roommate didn’t answer call-waiting - it was my best friend calling me offering me a free trip to Chicago - a rich buddy of hers had graduated with good grades - her dad was footing the bill for the whole thing.
Dammit.