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  Not long after the tragic fall of President, Trafalgar, and Buckminster came the demise of answering services. They were favored by doctors for after-hours emergencies, by actors for the crucial callback, and by those people, ahead of their time, who couldn’t stand to miss a call. The diverse and idiosyncratic voices that manned the services are silenced now; also gone forever are comic movie scenes of wires being hastily jabbed into switchboards by rows of operators whose antic garbling of messages drove the helter-skelter plot. Instead we have the answering machine. We wonder how we managed without it, yet manage we did. We must have lived more patiently. We had, perforce, the capacity to wait. But machines shape our nature as much as anything else, and the answering machine has wrought the need to reach out and touch someone—or someone’s echo—into a craving that demands instant gratification. The messages that greet callers are another Goffmanesque presentation of self. Early messages had a naive transparency, as in any new craft or art; in hindsight they seem touchingly ingenuous, like the great primitive paintings. Some were arch and self-conscious, others gracious—“I’m so sorry I can’t get to the phone,” or as one friend more elaborately put it, “I’m sorry to greet you with a recorded announcement.” One of my favorites, showing a rare existential precision, declared, “This is the voice of John Smith.”

  How fast we’ve moved beyond all that. We’re sophisticated, adaptable, ready to explore the possibilities of the form. Greetings range from friendly and functional to bare-bones terse: one close friend simply states her phone number—the ultimate in Mondrianesque. I get the point—this is, after all, only a machine—yet I feel a chill through my bones each time. Must she be quite so stark? It’s not the world at large who’s calling. It’s me!

  In the middle of the spectrum are the playful—snatches of popular songs hinting at the greeter’s passing mood, the most famous bars of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” the daily changing homilies from Ecclesiastes or enshrined poetry—and what can only be called kitsch: the family’s youngest member piping out a rehearsed sentence, sometimes assisted by a pet.

  What a jolt it was, hearing my very first machine greeting. What was this eerie artifice, this absent presence? Did it actually expect me to say something in return? Over my dead body. I was so boggled by the prospect that I just hung up. Later I was told that hanging up mute is a form of rudeness. I didn’t feel rude. How could you be rude to a machine? But apparently you could. How odd Miss Mulcare would have found that: machines legislating manners, expecting all the courtesy due to their owners.

  I made judgments of character, in those frontier days, based on who had answering machines. But as they sprang up like weeds, my categories broke down. It was not merely the trendy, the anxious, or the self-important, but just plain folk. A select few, though, would surely never succumb: too old-fashioned, unimpressed by novelty, temperamentally ill-suited. How wrong I was. In the end, in a revolution that changed forever the nature of human connection and conversation, everyone succumbed.

  Me too. I spent hours poring over the manual. Within a couple of weeks I was able to use the machine adequately, although tricks such as fast forwarding and selective erasing still strike me as risky. After some months, I learned by trial and error how to pick up my calls from outside. One day soon I may even feel ready to erase calls from outside.

  I used to come home each day eager to check my mail. Now I have a double desire. I look for the flashing red bar, I count its flashes. I don’t feel especially neglected or unloved if there are none; in some ways it’s a relief to be left alone. What I do miss is the frisson called forth by news, happenings, change. Even in the absence of the flashing red bar I sometimes listen anyway, to be quite sure.

  And what do I find? Styles of addressing machines are as varied as voices themselves. Most callers keep their usual patterns of diction and pace and inflection, and their usual personalities too. But a few are curiously altered, the kindly becoming imperious, the reserved loquacious. Romantic, volatile souls turn lucid and precise, and vice versa. Who can say why? Art is a mystery. Listening to one’s messages is a study in the varieties of human response to a vacuum. We eavesdrop on a voice alone yet not alone, on a soliloquy played into the dark, in an empty house.

  Gone are the amateur days of fumble and stammer. Now, when we make a call, we’re prepared for the canned greeting; we have our speeches set. We talk freely, maybe even more freely than had we reached an actual person. Sometimes we even prefer to reach a machine and are startled by a real voice—What are you doing at home! And we’re inhibited, as once we were inhibited by the machine; we need to revise our words to make them fit for live consumption.

  Certain coy messages hint at, but never give away, the essence—“I just found out something really shocking about X”—a transparent ploy that ensures a quick call back. The efficiency-minded rattle off information, sending us scurrying for a pencil, while purists leave austere names and numbers; they wouldn’t dream of confiding anything to a machine. I appreciate their Spartan aesthetic, but their opposites are far more entertaining. I mean the callers who make an imaginative leap and address my recorded voice as if it were my receptive presence, telling it everything they would tell me. With those messages, I settle in to listen awhile, chuckling or frowning as I would at any amazingly lifelike performance. Paradoxically, I’m in no hurry to call back, for it seems I’ve already had the zesty human exchange, and in so undemanding a fashion, too.

  As a rule I return most of my calls promptly and willingly. But what of the others? The machine, with its demand for a response, makes the nuances of connection pitilessly explicit. We can gauge our feelings for people—feelings once serenely vague—by how soon we find ourselves calling back and how eagerly. Even worse, our caller can do the same. In the early days of ineptitude you could say the message was lost or the machine broken, but that excuse won’t fly anymore. No, we are fated to discover all there is to know about our attachments, and to those who prize self-knowledge this may be a boon. Not such a boon, maybe, is discovering how keenly others feel attached to us.

  But not all unreturned calls mean we’re unloved. Lots of people, never having been schooled by Miss Mulcare, simply take advantage of a new way of being rude. Is not returning calls the same as not answering letters, or is it worse because the human voice—mightier even than the pen—is involved? If we’re overlooked do we call again? How soon? More than once? I’m irritated by the nonreturners, and yet I secretly envy them. I wish I had that blithe and awful freedom.

  Until recently, the only mail I received from the phone company was a monthly bill. Now they write constantly—clogging the mailbox, raising the rates, toppling the trees—to persuade me that some cunning new phone game would improve my life. Don’t I want Speed Calling, Call Forwarding, Reminder Call? Three-Way Calling sounds piquant, a near relation of the ménage à trois. It might eventually supplant more traditional gathering places such as coffee shops, bars, and park benches. If one of the phone companies’ aims is indeed to make human contact superfluous, it had better be planning alternate arrangements for procreation in the brave new world: phone sex can’t yet go that far.

  An undeniable aim is to ensure that the sound of the busy signal is heard no more in the land, since more completed calls mean more revenue. Success is imminent. The busy signal has all but died without the proper obsequies. Brought down by what a 1994 New York Times article calls “the demands of a frenetic society that increasingly sees the busy signal as a symbol of failure and lost opportunity, a vestige of the past that is no longer tolerable.” Lost opportunity? Symbol of failure? What harsh words! The busy signal could be irksome, yes, but it was reassuring too. The object of desire was nearly within our grasp—tantalizingly there but not there. The preconditions of story, of romance. (Are they, too, a vestige of the past?) A little while longer and our efforts would be rewarded. Granted, we might suffer some jealousy and resentment meanwhile, but they were manageable, tempered by anticipation
.

  Uncertainty gives ordinary life the fine edge of suspense. Just so, the chance of a busy signal spiced the banal act of phoning. Now, with all the automated means of circumventing the busy signal, there’s almost always success, of some sort or other. These semi-successes offer a restless semi-satisfaction which, as with sex, food, and sleep, is arguably worse than none at all. Moreover, alleged aids like Memory Mode or Redial, which require only one stroke rather than the arduous seven, not only glorify sloth and impatience but create a false sense of urgency. In time they make us less able to recognize true urgency, the way advertising distorts the true nature of need.

  If the busy signal has not been properly mourned, its most common standin, Call Waiting, has been too naively welcomed, like the stranger of legend who knocks on the door in a storm and is given a place by the hearth, then makes off with the family heirlooms or worse. Call Waiting titillates the basest of impulses—greed and opportunism. (So sorry, a subsequent engagement, as Oscar Wilde prophetically said.) It plays on our anxiety—the nasty little need to know what or who might be better than what we’ve got now. More than a need: a fear, tantamount to desperation—given the Pavlovian alacrity with which people respond to the click—that something might be missed. The chance of a lifetime? Or an exciting emergency that requires our participation? And yet no one who’s shunted me aside—after having phoned me!—has ever returned saying, I’ve got to go, my child has taken ill, or, Hey, I won the lottery.

  For the interrupting caller, Call Waiting means being swiftly weighed in the balance. Are you more alluring than the person you innocently broke in on? If so, you feel gratification but also a small tug of guilt, as at any impure victory. If not, you’re summarily dismissed. The busy signal avoided such minor abrasions to the spirit; it acted as an anodyne.

  In the end, whatever role we play in the unholy Call Waiting triad, we talk on tenterhooks. Impending interruption, judgment, and competition hover over our words, draining the bloom of the present moment. The exchange is vitiated, the implicit premise of conversation overturned. The goal of the telecommunications wizards might as well be to unravel the social contract.

  A half-dozen other examples of phone acrobatics confirm that our lives, our small going concerns, are important. They must be, mustn’t they?, to warrant such high-tech attention as Voice Dialing, Wake-Up Call, or the customized Ring Mate Service—“Why rush to the phone … only to learn the call is … for someone else in your household?” Pay for a distinctive ring that’s all your own. Or Call Answering, the “revolutionary” message recording service touted as a lifesaving device, the EMS of phone life: “Imagine being in the middle of a call when another call comes in. … Or Call Return, which by the touch of a button reconnects the call you missed while racing from the shower.

  One and all, they not only reveal unsightly fault lines in human nature, but widen them. There’s something authoritative about a ringing phone, and the new devices encourage us to leap like good soldiers to the sound of authority. Even more, they appeal to latent desperation, rubbing at the sore need to feel connected, though to whom seems immaterial. How, they collectively needle us, can we afford to miss news that might change our lives? The implication is that our present lives are not quite enough, not quite right. And existentially speaking, that may well be. Insufficiency and imperfection are built into the human condition and are the impetus for art and science, love and crime. But they will not be remedied, or at least only temporarily, by a phone call.

  In the past, it wasn’t uncommon to ignore a ringing phone, provided you didn’t have aged parents or young children on the loose. It was an impersonal act, or personal in the deepest sense—an assertion that privacy matters, that the uninterrupted flow of consciousness is our true life, maybe our only entitlement. But even if we have the strength of character to let the phone ring, the gesture is no longer the same. What was once a refusal has become a mere deferral; the answering machine will take the call. And as we all know, standing by while a plaintive voice addresses our machine makes us feel not private but roguishly perverse—a perverseness tinged with an unsavory sense of power.

  That same power is the appeal of the insidious Caller ID, which “makes sure you’re in control.” The caller’s number appears on a little box near the phone: if you don’t want him or her, don’t answer. (This is quite different from ignoring an anonymous ring—no tribute to privacy but an out-and-out snub.) Obviously Caller ID might be useful in deterring heavy breathers and dirty talkers, as well as children playing phone games: As kids, we’d call the local funeral parlor just for the pleasure of saying, “I’m dying to give you my business.” And control of any kind can be a heady feeling. Except in this case the gift of control, along with the theft of privacy, is mutual. Never again would I be sure whether my own unanswered call means no one’s home or I’m being forsaken.

  Besides sowing the seeds of doubt, Caller ID spoils the surprise of a phone call. The ring may be intrusive, yet it can’t help but set off a tiny thrill. Someone wants us. Who can it be? And for what? We must take what thrills we can get: In return for the interruption, grant us at least our shiver of suspense.

  Like entropy, technical ingenuity is unstoppable. The impish new options, embraced not wisely but too well, are here to stay, and already their effects on social life are being felt. Call Forwarding, for example, ensures that your caller doesn’t know where you are. He imagines you harmless at home while you’re at the racetrack or in a hotel room. Wives and husbands can chat about picking up a loaf of bread amidst any kind of betrayal; marriages remain intact and children undisturbed—a contribution to family values. A boost for privacy, at any rate. Not so Redial. Was your daughter talking to the boy you warned her off? Your son hobnobbing with a drug dealer? Your boss hiring your replacement? Press Redial and see who turns up. TV mystery plots have already incorporated these fertile twists, and since life imitates television, our daily rounds should soon be laced with phone intrigue. As a matter of fact the New York Times ran a rueful little article about a woman who was “humiliated by a telephone.” Pleading tiredness, she called to cancel a brunch date, only to find that her would-be host, equipped with Caller ID, knew immediately that she was calling from a mutual friend’s home. “Even though he said he wasn’t mad,” she lamented, “I haven’t heard from him for two weeks.”

  Notwithstanding all of the above, I must confess I have great affection for one clever phone game: the Conference Call. Conference Calls are festive—a regular little party, only you don’t have to stand on your feet balancing drinks and paper plates, or worry that your skirt is too short or your hair frizzing up in the humidity of a crowded room. Conference Calls make you feel important. They must be set up in advance; your convenience is considered, never the case with ordinary calls. They arrive promptly, at least in my limited experience (I hope my future holds more Conference Calls). The operators are polite—they too must think the parties are important simply by virtue of engaging in a Conference Call. There’s something amiably civil about the whole process. “Are you there, Lynne? Good. We’ve already got Bob on the line. Please hold as we get Sue and Jim and Carol. … Are you there, Sue? Please hold as …” While you wait for the others to be lassoed from their far-off venues and pulled into the auditory corral, you can chat with the early arrivals, the kind of spontaneous freewheeling talk of people off on a giddy spree. Suddenly a new voice is heard. Welcome, Jim. Hi, Carol. The operator, like a suave maitre d’, bows out and the fête can begin. The habits of group discourse undergo a slight shift, becoming more democratic. The shy are encouraged to speak, for when a voice is the sole sign of our presence, an absent voice is notable. Those who talk too much are cut off more readily than if they loomed two feet away. Time is money, so matters are settled nimbly, without awkward silences or show-offy wrangling. No travel time is involved. All in all, the Conference Call is a far more natural outgrowth of the original telephone, the functional phone of Hudson and the Forsytes, tha
n the grotesque mutations of Call Waiting or Call Return.

  Or of Voice Mail, the dread labyrinth; I shudder to think of Miss Mulcare ensnared in it. Voice Mail is reshaping the dynamics of daily trivia. Humble though they are, trivia form the armature of our lives. We may curse them, yet we lean on them for comfort, as well as for relief from more serious pursuits. And we relied on the anonymous voices whose answers, sullen or friendly, helped us dispatch life’s errands. Well, no more.

  Voice Mail, whether its architects know it or not, has an august history. It derives from no less than Plato, who in his Dialogues used a process of dichotomizing and categorizing to generate the endlessly forking, ramifying answers to philosophical questions. Centuries later the Neoplatonist scholar Porphyry gave so astute an analysis of the method that it became known as a Tree of Porphyry. As a mode of inquiry, the Tree could provide instruction and delight, if you had the time. But Plato would be the first to agree it was never intended for the mundane. For one thing, it takes too long. (If Voice Mail is saving time for anyone, it’s certainly not the humble citizen.)