Messages from the past

I have migrated back to my old Macintosh laptop to write these blog entries, so I'm using a way old version of Word that doesn't even underline the spellng errs. It's kinda fun in a retro sort of way. Besides, I can write on the dining room table upstairs, and my wife doesn't chide me for dissappearing into the basement (where our main computers are).

The only drawback is it's an old passive-matrix screen, so the old System 7 mac cursors tend to get lost when you are moving the mouse, which is like your steering wheel vanishing every time you try to turn a corner. Thus, I hunted around on my old floppies to see if I had some utilty to fix this problem, and found some cool stuff I'd backed up all those years ago. (When Wintel PCs hit $300, I defected from Apple puters like a Cuban who'd inherited a yacht.)

Back in the day before corporate ladders and the sometimes twitchy parents of other children calling, my wife and I used to try and make our phone message as wild as possible, hoping for recored guffaws and profanity from our victims, which we would then use to blackmail six-packs from them. We actually spontaneously won a radio contest where we got tickets to a Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald concert held on a virgin field up by Aspen, and a nifty jacket we wear to this day, when a DJ had called our number for some other reason. Our message tickled him so much, he invented the "funny answering machine message" contest, and we were the first winners, since ours was the inspiration for the contest.

Anyway, for a bit we used the phrase you hear my wife voice in the message that we'd heard on TV or a movie that cracked us up (though it's not the winner of the aforementioned contest). We had to change it after a few days because when people got us live on the phone, they alerted us that they didn't leave a message because they didn't think it was us. However, one of my buddies called and actually answered it this way, impromptu, on the spot, right out of the gate:

THE MESSAGE


(Oh, and apologies for the "f" word - the other one. Please do recall that there was a day when Richard Pryor still used the "n" word loosely, and this message is old enough to have been back in the day when most of us used the other "f" word losely. Back before we had "blights" [see below], even.)