365 days of celebration


Inane Answering Message Day

Posted by Brittany

Inane Answering Message DayToday is Inane Answering Message Day! According to this day’s creators at, today is “the day set aside to change, shorten, replace or delete those ridiculous and/or annoying answering machine messages that waste the time of anyone who must listen to them.” Unfortunately, many people interpret this “unofficial” as meaning the exact opposite, and use today as an excuse to put a silly or annoying mesage on their macine. While I do have some respect for a message that can actually make me laugh (vis-a-vis George’s answering machine message on Seinfeld) most messages are undoubtedly exceeding long or annoying before you get to the beep. Or some are just plain silly. Take my Dad’s, for instance — it ends with a quote from his favorite movie, The Tall T. And while it had me smiling at first, it’s getting a little old hearing “come on now, it’s ‘gonna be a nice day.” Sorry Dad!

Chris and I decided to take the true meaning of this “unofficial” to heart and update our messages on all of our phones. We checked our landline first and, surprisingly, when we set up the message years ago, it was a simple “You’ve reached Britt and Chris, Leave a message.” It doesn’t get much more concise than that, so that was one down, two to go. Next, we updated both our cells. Chris’s wasn’t too bad to begin with, but he was able to shorten it a couple more seconds by changing it to a simple, “This is Chris, leave a message.” Mine, on the other hand, was still set to the default robot greeting that goes on and on — so annoying! So, like Chris, I updated mine to “This is Britt, leave a message.”

Of course, all of these changes didn’t happen without a little goofing off first. In particular, we had fun recording a few greetings with Chris’s T-Pain app, but they were so ridiculous we ended up deleting them. Chris also recorded a hilarious “hide ‘yo wife, hide ‘yo kids” homage to Antoine Dobson, but we decided it wasn’t exactly appropriate for some callers. Oh well, at least we had our fun. And hopefully our future callers will appreciate our new NOT inane answering messages!

POP-POP-POP! Tomorrow is Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day!

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