Why is it that occasionally (about once a week) your telephone answering machine records as a message the “If you would like to make a call, please hang up and try again” recording that plays when you leave the phone off the hook? This has happened to me with various machines, telephones, and telephone numbers, as well as to friends and family, even though no one was home to knock the phone off the hook. –Mike Smith, Los Angeles
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This has happened to Cecil, too, but he’s been having a helluva time trying to get it to happen again, which is always the way in the investigative journalism business. However, having consulted with a couple of phone buffs, we can offer the following tentative scenario, which applies to at least some answering machines: (1) Someone calls you, then thinks better of it and hangs up. (2) The phone continues to ring at your end for a brief time, since there’s a delay while the switching equipment processes the hang-up message and stops the ringer. (3) Your answering machine picks up the phone. But since the caller has hung up, all it gets is a dial tone. Not being bright enough to realize this, it goes ahead and plays your outgoing message. (4) Your line stays off-hook long enough to trigger the telephone company’s “please hang up and dial again” message. (5) Your outgoing message ends and the answering machine records the “please hang up” message. (6) You come home, play back the telco message, get bugged, write Cecil. (7) I provide a charming, easy-to-understand answer. (8) You gratefully mail me a big wad of cash. Tell you what. If it really bugs you, keep the cash and buy yourself an answering machine that’s less easily fooled.
THE STORY OF THE SMILEY: THE SAGA CONTINUES
Readers breathlessly awaiting further word from this department on Harvey R. Ball’s beleaguered claim to have drawn the original smiley face in 1963 will be pleased to know that one of the smiley sweatshirts given away by WMCA radio in New York in 1962/1963 has turned up–and it’s not the canonical smiley. (We love the word canonical, incidentally, and the chance to continue using it is the principal reason we are pursuing this interminable quest.) The WMCA smiley is, however, close, having perhaps a Bill Clinton half-brotheresque relationship to the genuine article. The smiley is printed in black on yellow cloth and consists of two eye dots and a mouth curve in a circle. But it appears to have been drawn with a thick paintbrush and consequently is more irregular (and frankly has more personality) than the Ballic (Balltic? Ballistic?) smiley. I am sure the people of Worcester, Massachusetts, of which Harvey is a leading citizen, will breathe easier on hearing this.
