Leave a message after the beep

Here’s something I think about almost every time I am about to leave a message for someone.  Do we still need to record an outgoing message telling people to ‘please leave a message after the tone’?  Do we really need to remind people when and how they need to start recording a message for us?

We are in the twenty first century; we have cars that can automatically parallel park for us, we have computers that are smarter than any software engineer out there; we have missiles that can seek out and shoot a target from thousands of miles away without any help from a human being, but yet we still need a reminder to ‘leave a message after the beep’?  Haven’t we been doing that for many, many years by now?  Do we still not know what to do when we hear that beep?

Typically, when I get one of those outgoing messages I like to pretend I didn’t hear their instructions on how to record my message.  Instead when I hear the beep, I start talking to my kids in the background, giving instructions and then complain into the phone about how I don’t know if I heard the the beep and if I should be recording a message at this point or hanging up…  I do however absolutely love those people that record their outgoing message as: “It’s me, you know what to do!”  Nothing else, which is more like it.