Nutty Answering Machines

January 30, 2006

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Profile America — Monday, January 30th. This is a day when it's okay to voice your displeasure at one of the pet gripes of many people — it's Inane Answering Message Day. The goal is to change and, hopefully, shorten ridiculous messages found on a lot of telephone answering machines — messages such as: "Hello, I'm Sue's refrigerator. The answering machine is broken; but if you'll give me your message, I'll put it on my door." Life today has too many time demands, and people simply want to leave their message quickly and get back to business. And Americans do make a lot of calls. Every day, we make 1.5-billion local calls and nearly 250-million long distance calls — not counting those dialed up on our cell phones. You can find these and more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau on the Web at <www.census.gov>.

Sources: Chase's Calendar of Events 2006, p. 108
Statistical Abstract of the United States 2004-2005, t. 1143
http://www.census.gov/prod/www/statistical-abstract-04.html