Answer Machines

My case is quite simple. I want people to buck the trend and get rid of their telephone-answering machines. Nobody, professionals aside, really needs to make such a fuss over telephone calls as to require a precise record of them.

There are also subtle horrors created by these devices of convenience. Think of it: at the end of each day, perfectly decent people are made into insufferable clerks, sifters of messages, arbitrating between the day’s dozens of pathetic pleas--”call me!”

In previous years a person away from home was not obliged to return an arbitrarily large number of telephone calls: when a telephone rings in an empty house and there is no machine to answer it, there exists no call to return. In such an event, the calling party simply takes heart, thinking, “Ah, well, no one is home, I shall try again later.”

But today’s inquiring folk must leave their message in the certain knowledge that they will be audited, later, perhaps wearily, and no guarantee is made that a return call might be doled out. Worse still, the caller who, hoping to make a contact at the very earliest, makes a call every hour or so will be unjustly perceived as a nag or neurotic; this merely because his calls are presented in an amplified clump, in all their mundane, artless persistence.

Answering machines, lauded by the industry as indispensable, are rightly seen as a curse. Their steady proliferation through all strata of society--working man and ingenue, alike--causes me and, no doubt, silent helpless multitudes to fret, for no good end, over each encounter with the telephone.

RONALD BLOOM

Los Angeles