July 2, 1999
Friday

A writing prompt I came across today suggested listing “all the greetings you’ve used to answer your telephone.” (From List Yourself: Listmaking as the Way to Self-Discovery by Ilene Segalove and Paul Bob Velick.)

As with all writing suggestions in this book, the prompt is at the top of the page and is followed by twenty-two lines for the recalled items. 22? Can there be 22 ways to answer the phone??

My parents always used the standard “Hello,” although there was a brief period when my sister and I were required to answer with “Yakimoff Residence, Margaret Mary (or Rosemary) speaking.” I was about eleven then, and just beginning to get a lot of girlfriend calls. I felt like a dweeb rattling off that long string, and I thought “residence” sounded like we were putting on airs, since we lived in a semi-detached house in a city neighborhood that had twenty-five kids in four addresses. I usually mumbled the greeting and hoped it was an adult calling one of my parents.

My best friend’s family used their last name. “Freys’!” I’d hear, and if it was my friend, I’d say “Yes, and a thick shake.” I had another friend who said “Good Morning” unless it really was morning, in which case he would say something else, like “Speak!!”

We had only one phone in that semi-detached house. It was in the dining room at the bottom of the stairs. I had to sit on the wide third step (where the staircase made its right angle) to conduct my calls. This meant I was only a few feet from my father watching TV in the living room or my sister doing homework at the dining table.

When I was 16 we moved to a new suburban house that had a phone on each floor – in the kitchen, the basement rec room, and my parents’ bedroom. This afforded some privacy, but not much. Some of my friends had an extension in their own bedrooms — a pink “Princess phone” was popular for girls. The ultimate in cool, however, was to have a separate line, listed in the phone book as “Children’s telephone . .”

These days, I rarely answer the family phone. It’s almost never for me, and when it is it is very likely something mundane like an appointment reminder or a recorded notice that I have overdue library books. We use the standard “Hello.” I have my own phone in my study, and during business hours I sometimes answer with “This is Margaret DeAngelis,” in case the caller is a potential client.

Both phones have answering machines. I never had such a device until about 1990. This is my version of the “walking to school in the snow” legend. Through the fifties and the sixties and even most of the seventies, answering machines were associated solely with big companies that received lots of calls after hours. Individuals rarely had them. Through all my dating years I had to hope a roommate took good messages (“Some guy called — he wants you to call him back — I forget the number — I think it had a 4 in it”) or, when I lived alone, that the interested party would call back.

The current message on the DeAngelis family answering machine starts with “You have reached . . .” and marches crisply to the end. (I hate cute answering machine greetings.) The one in my study informs the caller that Margaret DeAngelis is the presenter of The Story Stream Writing Workshops. I am amazed at how often the family line gets messages for a car repair business in a different area code that has a similar number (“Is that Chevy Blazer still available?”) or my study line gets something like “Hi Nancy this is Jason call me back.” Don’t people listen?

I have a phone in my car and a pager, both for security. But we don’t have call waiting, call forwarding, caller ID, or “ident-a-ring.” Nor do we (yet) have a fax, a special internet line, or a separate phone for my daughter. Her idea of ultimate cool is to be “instant messaging” on the web while chatting by voice on the other line, a practice I think is absurd. (My disallowing this is my only “mean mother” directive to date.) To provide all these dedicated lines would mean digging up the front lawn, which we don’t want to do until new digital technology comes to Susquehanna Township residential neighborhoods.
It’s possible that we don’t want to do this anyway — just how accessible do we have to be?