I was talking with someone yesterday and the discussion turned to answering machines. Remember those? Tape-recording (and later, digital-recording) contraptions you plugged into your land line (remember those?) for callers to leave messages on in the days before everyone had cell phones and portable voice mail? Those things?

I blame answering machines, by the way, for one of my many maladaptive social behaviors -- I can no longer carry on a fruitful real-time discussion. I've barely picked up a ringing phone in three years; now I let the caller leave a message, and I deliberate how best to respond, then call back, fingers crossed that I get THEIR voice mail. With e-mail, my preferred mode of communication for the last 15 years, the delay is built in. I still carry on live, in-person analog conversations, but I spend way more time buffering before responding than I used to. Or maybe that's just age.

(I blame the VCR for another major maladaptive behavior of mine -- the inability to make a decision. Once I no longer had to decide which favorite show to watch in first-run and which to wait for the rerun, or decide between watching TV and going out, well, it was all over.)

But I digress. Today's conversation began with a friend telling me how she leaves an outgoing message-du-jour on her machine for callers. I responded first with delight at the idea, then surprise as I remembered that that had been one of my own favorite activities of the '80s and '90s. I'd come up with a new, hopefully entertaining, outgoing message for my answering machine every week or two back when I lived in the Bangor area. I would spend anywhere from minutes to hours (!) scripting them, tracking down any other necessary audio sources, "producing" them (if you could call my primitive, untrained techniques "producing") -- then recording them over and over and over and over into the machine until I finally got a take I was pleased with. I usually tried to make them funny, but a fair number of them just had a theme built around a song.

Most of them escape me now, but I remember a couple of favorites. There was the one I logged around the time Hurricane -- I wanna say Bob -- blew through, and I used the song "Hurricane" by, um, Peter Schilling, I think? (If I'd had the recording, I might have used the very different Bob Dylan song by that name.) When the Berlin Wall fell, I built a message around Elton John's "Nikita." My favorite funny one had me conversing with God using the "Oh, stop groveling!" bit from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." And at the holidays, I butchered "The Christmas Song" with Frank Sinatra singing it behind me.

I stopped doing those after a while once I moved to NH, partly because I worked from home, but I had an answering machine that enabled me to play separate messages for work and personal calls, so that's not really an excuse. I guess the real reason is just that all the personal drama just sucked all the creativity out of me. In any case, technology has advanced, and the practice seems quaint and outdated with today's new sophisticated message-taking electronics. Sad, really. Now, it's all about the ringtones. And I haven't figured out yet how to get new ones onto my phone to replace the standard-issue ones.

But if I remember correctly, I've got a cassette tape lying around somewhere with some of those old messages archived on it. I'll have to dig it up and give it a listen. That's if I can find a working cassette-playing machine.