Blinking voice mail

Photo: Yesterday Danny and I took in the Guelph Studio Tour and Guelph Arts Festival, making a stop at U of G Arboretum (in this photo) to enjoy the fall colours, which are at their peak here. We saw some awesome autumn skies and dodged a few rain showers. I'll post a gallery of photos when I have time, probably tomorrow.

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Sunday word association

1. Dimension:: Fourth
   
2. Roger:: eloquentwthrage
   
3. CSI:: college studies insane
   
4. Passenger:: pigeon
   
5. Thankful:: Danny
   
6. Has-been:: moccasins
   
7. Bambino:: spumonti
   
8. Wrinkles:: in time
   
9. Cable TV:: don't have it
   
10. Voicemail:: blinking
    

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A week ago Friday I was preparing to leave for Thanksgiving weekend. Running an hour behind, I phoned the cottage to tell my parents when I expected to arrive.

"Did you get our messages?" Dad asked.

No, I hadn't received any messages from my parents. They had phoned a couple times earlier in the week, once on Wednesday to suggest I drive up a day earlier to avoid holiday traffic. I could have hopped down to pick up my daughters on Friday afternoon; it's a nicer drive from the cottage than from here. It would also have given me a day to visit alone with my parents, probably a good thing at this time. But I hadn't heard from them.

When we got off the phone, I dialled my voice mail and found 14 messages waiting. I started listening to them: four from Jon, four from my parents, one from Danny, one from Sylvie, one from my dentist, one from the job advisor, and two from my contact at Canadian Mental Health Association. The first one, from Jon, was almost two weeks old. I had not received notification for any of them.

Immediately I phoned Sprint to rectify the problem. After navigating the labyrinth of voice messages to filter customers through their system, I waited a relatively brief period before actually speaking to a customer service agent. I had barely started to describe the problem when she clued in. Apparently I wasn't the first customer with this problem. She told me to hang up; in a moment she would call me back, and I was not to answer the phone. Then I would wait a couple minutes, pick up the receiver to see whether I had received notification of her message, then wait for her to call me back again and confirm. We went through all that, and the notification worked properly. So it was fixed. Now I was running 90 minutes late.

It was strange to look back on the two weeks I had gone without receiving those 14 notifications. It had been a crucial time for me and Jon looking for an apartment together. I had been particularly puzzled as to why he didn't answer my phone messages, and he had probably felt the same. Perhaps the problem contributed to his decision not to move.

I remember thinking it strange that Danny didn't phone me when he got home from San Francisco; it was unlike him not to. I remember being pissed off that Sylvie hadn't phoned me for so long after I had her over for dinner. I remember being frustrated that the woman from CMHA never called me back. And I was puzzled about not hearing from my parents when they had said they would call.

During those two weeks I was also relatively lonely and depressed. Do you ever get the feeling that you have dropped out of everyone's radar?

In fact, I hadn't. My friends were phoning as much as—even more than—usual. I just wasn't receiving their messages, and had no way of knowing they had called. If Dad hadn't mentioned it, I still might not realize the problem.

My voice mail isn't working again. Danny returned home from Winnipeg on Wednesday. He left three voice mail messages between the time he arrived and when he caught the bus for Guelph the next day, but I didn't receive notification for any of them. Once again I was puzzled. Fortunately he emailed me, too, so we didn't have much miscommunication about the trip, except that I wasn't waiting for him at the bus station as promised.

It makes me realize how much we have come to depend on technology. Voice mail is a relatively new thing. My parents didn't even have an answering machine until about 10 years ago, or a microwave for that matter. Now Mom is talking about getting a microwave for the cottage, which we could run off the generator, but honestly that seems a bit excessive.

Now we take these things for granted, and when they don't work, we're lost.