Over the years, we’ve had a variety of greetings for our voice mail. When my kids were young, I our greeting was me talking to them. One of these greetings included asking you to leave a message for “Pootie Wheeler”. This one was everyone’s favorite. I’ve always been split on how informational and how entertaining I want to be on these messages. I know that a lot of people use the system greetings where it either tells your number or only says your name with the phone company’s voice doing the rest of the work. That’s too straightforward for me. It also seems to be a long greeting with a lot of information we already know to sit through to just ask someone to give you a call back. My greeting at work is as brief as possible. I tell my name, the name of the company and ask them to leave a message if they wish. It gives them enough information to help them confirm they’ve reached the right number and gives them the option to leave a message, which they will be doing anyway if they are still listening.
For a long time, my dad had a greeting on his cell phone that was extremely short. It said, “This is Jimmy…Leave a message please.” The message was like that for several years and I never thought there was anything odd about it. One day, our family was in our car going somewhere and for some reason we needed to contact my dad. Everyone in the car had a cell phone and for whatever reason it was decided that my daughter Mary needed to call him. He didn’t answer, so she left him a message. When she hung up, she laughed and said, “Well, alright then!” We asked her what was up, and she asked if we had heard my dad’s greeting. From the way she was acting we thought it was a new message, so we asked what he said. It turned out to be the same message as before, but she thought he said, “Listen to me! Leave a message please!” Now any time someone is leaving a message for my dad or our family is making fun of someone being hard of hearing we always say, “Listen to me!”