before I ever tried to write. One of the most popular messages was our attempt to be meta, to draw attention to the medium itself, to let people know we knew they were listening. When the message began, I started by saying, “Hello.” There was a brief pause, and we knew people would think I had answered the phone. We wanted them to start talking, to make them think they had reached a real person, not the message they probably intended to reach, anyway. Erik then cut in, “What are you doing answering the phone? We’re trying to rob this place.” It was not a particularly interesting setup as the joke was essentially the opening “hello,” but we continued the charade, making it clear Erik and Kevin weren’t there which is why we—the robbers—were there, and that callers could leave a message if we left the answering machine there. It was a juvenile prank at the beginning, nothing more, but we spent time trying to craft the motivation of the robbers (why would they answer the phone?) and the character (was his character angry at me for answering the phone? If so, why would he continue the message instead of just cutting it off right then?). We knew we had to follow the standard format of a message and tell people to leave a message after the beep,
but we needed to do so in character, so we had to adjust the story we were crafting to get to that particular ending. We were also playing on the trope of the time that if one tells callers they’re not home, somebody could come and rob them. That line of thinking never made sense to either of us as people simply replaced the fact that they weren’t home with a euphemism that meant the same thing: “We can’t come to the phone right now.” There was some belief that potential robbers were calling people’s homes (without cell phones, of course, so they would have to be at a payphone somewhere), trying to find empty houses, then driving there to rob them, while hoping the people hadn’t returned by then. We took an absurd idea and made an absurd message out of it. Not surprisingly, I had just switched my major to English that year, and I was reading writers from the 1960s, especially Kurt Vonnegut. I saw writers playing with their medium in a way my classes never showed me; Erik and I took that idea and applied it to the medium we had found for our creativity. Given how much he loved phone calls, he probably would have enjoyed influencing our messages. Given the novelty of answering machines during this era, it’s no surprise that people sold pre-made, 98
