Coming Face to Face With Time

I spoke to “time” the other day. Well, actually the voice of time. You know, when you dial and hear, “At the tone, the time will be. . . . “ You might have thought it was a computer or a little man locked in the Bureau of Time in Washington.

But it’s actually a woman in Atlanta named Joanne Daniels. She isn’t the voice of all time. She’s the voice of my time. But my time may not be your time.

Daniels is the voice of time for California and New York. The irony is that her accent is pure Southern honey, a sound that rings of her hometown: Winder, Ga. But she turns off the Georgia voice at the tone and becomes the neutral voice of bi-coastal time.

She isn’t the voice of time in Atlanta, though. That’s because she works for a company there that makes a time-machine system. You buy its “voice talent” when you buy its machine.

Phone companies in New York and California bought it, but Georgia didn’t.

When she does a time job, what Daniels sells is her ability to sound like a neutral, warm person without an accent. The fact that she has a thick one is a testimony to her professionalism, but it’s also sort of symbolic of the weird world we live in.

Having a de-accented Georgia peach do time for California is a little like buying orange juice from Florida in Orange County, Calif.

So how does she actually do it--record time? Daniels sits in a recording studio with a special metronome that blinks every half-second. That gives her half a second to say her piece of time. She said the machine was especially invented for her.

“They call it Joanne’s Time Machine,” she says.

I asked her what a typical time gig was like. How much time can she do at once? She said she usually goes for about three hours, saying the same time three to five times with different inflections. An editor picks the best time.

I imagine him running up to Joanne and saying, “Joanne, your 3:45 is to die for.”

Joanne, like most voice talent, is actually an actress who found she could make a living doing time. But she also lands the occasional acting role. When she played Stefanie Powers’ marriage counselor on a recent NBC movie of the week--”When Will I Be Loved?”--few viewers knew they were watching time.

When she meets people at parties, she usually tells them she’s a speech coach (which she also is) because actress has an--um--connotation. But occasionally people figure out her claim to fame as the voice of time. Then they poke her in the ribs and ask, “Do ya’ have to do that all the time ?”

I asked Joanne for advice on how ordinary slobs should talk on the phone when they record a message. She said, “Be specific with your information, speak slowly and always leave the time.”

One would assume that being the voice of time would be lucrative, but Joanne says that she merely gets paid once for the recording session. But she adds with a Southern belle’s coyness, “If I got residuals, I’d be the richest woman in the world.”

I told her in parting that it was a pleasure speaking to her.

“Any time,” she said.