In a low, guttural growl of a voice that says “thus better be frakkin’ important” a voice dripping with hate and menace, my message quite simply says…
“You know the routine…leave a message”
I hate phones, hate getting calls, so my VM message is designed to scare off frivilous callers, and it works, my freinds often comment on how scary my message sounds
That’s awesome. I would laugh so hard… Now I’m going to think about changing mine to say “this is 773- blah blah blah…” just to see what happens. I’m due for a new voicemail message anyway, because my husband finally got his own phone.
I have no idea. I assume most of my numbers have some kind of default message, and I suspect my work number has my voice saying “bobotheoptimist” then a female voice “Is not available”
Home might have something recorded by my wife, but I don’t really pay attention.
Currently, my message is something like
“You have reached [number]. This is [Balance]. There is no Buck [Balance], [Balance]-Smythe, [Balance]-ette, or [totally un-Balance-related name] at this number, nor do I know any such person. If you are calling for one of these people, you have the wrong number. If you happen to be someone who is actually trying to contact me, please leave a message and your number at the beep.”
I get lots of really persistent wrong numbers. The message has finally gotten rid of most of the non-robot callers.
I have–at more whimsical and less exasperated times–had these messages:
“I was nowhere near there at the time. In fact, I’m not even here at this time. Take it up with my lawyer, Mr. Beep.”
“This conversation is being recorded for the convenience of the nice man in the black suit and shades.”
“This is [radio call sign], and you’re on the air!”
I have no idea. Mine is in French, which I don’t speak, because Mrs. R. thinks that is amusing.
ETA: I mean the land line, I should say. My cell phone has a boring one because I’m job hunting.
I used to have the standard “Hi, you’ve reached Pretend’s phone, I’m not here now but leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you…”, which I thought was fine until after hearing it on someone else’s phone for about the thousandth time, I questioned why everyone feels the need to explain the procedure to follow in order to leave a message, as if it’s a new and complex concept.
Why not say “Hi, this is Pretend’s phone. It’s just a recording of my voice, and via the wonders of technology you have reached my ‘Answering Machine’. This is fairly new technology, so I’ll explain it to you; when the beep plays if you could leave me with details of who you are, maybe a method via which I could call you back and an idea of what the call was to be about. That’d be great.” Maybe that’s taking it too far…but everyone knows what an answering machine does, so mine is simply “This is Pretend’s phone, you know what to do.”
Too boring?
Mine is “Hi, you’ve reached [us]. The more profanity in your message, the more likely we are to call you back. Go!”
The first few weeks with it were sublime. The incoherent strings of expletives were things of raw beauty. Now, after having it for months it just sits there waiting to embarrass me when someone from my new job calls.
It was fun. I played Bluff the Listener, where you have to select the true story out of three unlikely ones (the other two are made up by the respective panelists). If I recall, the general subject was oddball car upgrades that people were willing to pay for (the correct answer was tires that have pretty fragrances instead of dead rubber smell). Fortunately, in this case the other two stories were pretty easy to rule out, so I got lucky and got the right answer.
We played the CD on a pretty good stereo, and it sounds about the same as a real person on the (tinny-sounding anyway) answering machine. So I thought a CD was a pretty good way to do it.
Six months was a long time. I waited about 4 months before the first nag, and they claimed they didn’t have my street address (but they hadn’t bothered emailing me to ask for it). I waited another month for the second nag, and then it came about a month after that. I think Carl is just busy, he probably collects a bunch of these and finally sits down in a studio and rattles them off one after another. You can hear some funny ones on the Wait Wait web site here.
Roddy
My landline says “You’ve reached [Kat]'s voicemail. Please leave a message, including your name and phone number, and I’ll call you back when I get around to checking my voicemail. If this is one of my sisters, this is not my cell phone.”
The first sentence is self-explanatory.
The second is because the messages that I do get (not a lot, because people I really want to talk to have my cell number) didn’t have names and phone numbers (pretend my name is witty, you are wrong!) plus the fact that I can go weeks without checking my voicemail for the landline.
The third is because my sisters were calling and leaving messages (not noticing they dialed the landliine instead of the cell) and getting ticked when I didn’t call back.
Couple weeks after I put in that message, my mother called me on my cell to tell me that I had to change the last sentence. Because she’d just called my landline and not realized it wasn’t my cell until she heard that sentence. So I was supposed to add “or my mother” (although I never did).
“Hi, this is blondebear. I may or may not be home right now, so you may or may not want to leave a message. And I may or may not get back to you. Thanks a lot. 'Bye now”
Mine just says, “Hi, this is (Pumpkin). Leave a message.”
yawn
I can has message? Kthxbai!
Mine is: You’ve reached [my phone number] in Columbus, Ohio. Please leave a message.
For a while I was getting calls for people in other cities with similar area codes. Some of them were from far away - Australia, for instance. That hasn’t happened for a while, but I’ve been too lazy to change it. I don’t like long messages unless they’re really clever and amusing. I might need to steal one of the ones in this thread…
GT
I just remembered an old answering machine message. It just said “You’ve reached XXX-XXXX. We’re not home, so leave a message.” It’s not what it said, it’s how it was said. If you have “Sound Recorder” on your computer and a microphone, try this out.
Record something (like voicemail message)into the sound recorder. But, do it as slowly and with as deep a voice as possible. Then, go to ‘effects’ and select ‘increase speed (by 100%)’. The result, if done right, is super creepy.
I tried doing it the other way - speak high pitched and fast then slowing it down - it wasn’t nearly as cool an effect.
There is another cool effect, but it takes alot more time. Record your message - shorter is better. Then replay it backwards over and over again until you can memorize it. Then, record your voice repeating the memorized version. Play that backwards, the results are HI - Larious.
When I was living with a friend, our message was the following:
“<silence>
My voice: Something’s happening. It’s counting down.
His voice: OK, wait.
<click>”
We were trying to figure out how to work the answering machine, accidentally recorded the above message, and kept it. His boring parents nagged on him to change it, I refused, and he changed it to something boring behind my back. Bastard.
When I was living with my girlfriend, I had the following:
“You’ve reached Priceguy and Pricegal. This week’s Bible quote is <book, chapter, verse>.”
Followed by a recitation of the verse in question. I changed it every Monday, making sure it was something that would freak out the squares. You know, violence, blood, slavery, cruelty and sex. That sort of thing.
Hi. You have reached (Mr and Mrs 2U). We can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name, number, and a brief message, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. We do retain all of our recorded messages. Thank you for calling and have a good day.
(It’s our land line - my husband gets all his business calls on it. We have the “retain recorded messages” blurb on it because we were getting some threatening phone calls and they were leaving messages - this actually worked as a deterrent.)
MIne used to be:
“You have reached [phone number.] If you need further instructions, well…that’s just pathetic.”
Now it’s just whatever message came with the machine. I haven’t even looked at the instructions for recording a new message for the phone we bought last week.
Ur msg
It haz a flavr
or
My voicemailz
Let me show it you