One of my cost-cutting measures of late has been using my phone line as something almost unheard of in this modern day and age — as a phone. Nothing else. No call waiting, no caller ID, no voice mail, no fancy goodies of any sort. Just a phone. If someone calls when I’m home, I pick it up and answer it. If they call when I’m out, then they’ll just have to call back later. To my mind, it works well.<\/p>\n
When I lost my job and had to go back into job hunting, though, I knew that that wouldn’t be the best approach, so I went ahead and signed back up for voice mail. It worked fine while I was job searching. I’d get home, pick up the phone to see if it beeped at me to tell me I had messages, and I’d call back the few that weren’t telemarketers anxious to make a sale.<\/p>\n
Once I became gainfully employed, though…well, voice mail just isn’t for me. Due to the combination of an evening schedule that has me operating at hours quite different from a lot of people I know, a very small group of friends local to me in Seattle that I’d want to call anyway, and my own general semi-hermit lifestyle, I almost never pick up the phone to make a call. One of the few times I’ll call out is when I’m in a mood to order pizza, and then I’m dialing almost as soon as the phone leaves the cradle, and long before the handset reaches my ear. Hence, I never know if I have messages or not.<\/p>\n
So this morning I actually checked my messages. There were two on there — one a telemarketer that had tried to get ahold of me Dec.\u00a04th, and one from Rick, who wanted me to call him as soon as I got the message so we could clubbing that Friday night. Friday, Dec.\u00a05th, that is. Well, he wanted me to call him as soon as I got the message, so I did (and just got his<\/em> voicemail), but I think the verdict is pretty clear.<\/p>\n I’m a dork. :)<\/p>\n And I should probably pick up an answering machine and turn that fool voice mail off again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s a phone. Nothing else. No call waiting, no caller ID, no voice mail, no fancy goodies of any sort. Just a phone. If someone calls when I’m home, I pick it up and answer it. If they call when I’m out, then they’ll just have to call back later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2043],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-2023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","tag-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2023\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}