Please leave a message after the beep... or not.

      My family was one of the last families I know of to get an answering machine. In fact, I believe I was already off living on my own by the time my parents finally caved to the pressure. I know it was a constant source of frustration for friends and family members alike who would call and listen to the endless ringing on the other end, hoping with each new ring that either one of us would finally breathlessly pick up the phone or that the answering machine would put them out of their misery. I really don't know why there was such resistance towards purchasing and implementing this helpful device. Possibly procrastination. Or possibly because my mother is Italian.

      It turns out that Italians are answering-machine-phobic. I had no idea, but looking back I should have recognized the signs long ago. What I had chosen to perceive on a case by case basis, were actually symptoms of a national disorder. I would call my aunt and uncle in Rome and the phone would ring endlessly. I would call friends on their cell phones and instead of going to voice mail, the line would just go dead... or better yet, first a recorded voice would inform me that the number was momentarily busy or unavailable and then the line would go dead. The only messages I would receive on my land line's built in answering service were from friends and family in the US. And when I wanted to set up an outgoing message on my cell phone it turned out to be an impossibly confusing ordeal, like the phone company was telling me to not even bother. But still I wasn't getting it. I kept thinking how strange it was that no one I knew had some sort of answering machine set up. Meanwhile, by default, I became dependent on the text message as a substitute.

      Then I made two startling discoveries. First I discovered that were someone to call and leave a message on my cell, I would actually be charged for listening to it! Since this almost never happened, it took me a while to catch on. But once I was aware of it, I basically stopped listening to those rare messages that I received. Luckily, upon receipt of a message the phone company would send an automatically generated text telling me that a voice mail had been left by a certain number. I would then scroll through my contacts to see if it was someone I knew, and if it was I would call them back directly, skipping the costly in between step of actually listening to the message. The second discovery was that if I de-activated my voice mail altogether, I would receive a different automatically generated text, telling me the name (or number, if it wasn't someone in my contacts) of the person who had tried to call me and at what time. Needless to say I too soon became someone with no voice mail box.

      So what's this about? Why is there such a cultural aversion to the answering machine that even the cell phone providers assume that most people won't take advantage of that particular feature? Is it issues over talking to a machine? Is it performance anxiety regarding one's ability to improvise a compelling message on the spot? Is it a sense of pointlessness since all most people usually say is Hi. I called. Call me back.? I do have one very weak theory having to do with a general distrust of anything not taken care of face to face (or voice to voice) which I think could make for a very interesting ethnographic study, but I'll leave that one to the anthropologists.

      Meanwhile, when my now-husband and I moved into our house about seven months ago, and were gradually furnishing it via various consignment shops and flea markets, it seemed only natural to me to purchase an answering machine when I saw it there on the shelf. He went along with it, though I'm now sure he was just humoring me. As soon as we got home we recorded the outgoing message and had his sister call us to make sure it worked. It did! And that was very nearly the last message we've gotten. In fact I got so sick of coming home to seven blank messages and to the machine picking up after too few rings when I actually am home (of course the caller always hangs up as soon as the recorded message starts), that a few weeks ago I unplugged it altogether. And the irony of it all is that I now have neither answering machine nor voice mail box. Apparently I become more Italian everyday.

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