While I was digging through my audio cassette archives to locate material for this week's posting to Musical Mondays, I ran across my stash of old answering machine tapes. In my first few years of college, I was rather creative with my answering machines and developed a number of unique outgoing greetings. Anyway, I found several of those tapes and thought I'd share some of the outgoing messages, along with some of the interesting responses I got.

Some of the greetings I created just by speaking a carefully-crafted announcement over musical snippets I grabbed from other sources. Others were accompanied by original sounds/music that I'd put together. Most of the ones below use someone else's music for a background. Bonus points if you can identify the music I pulled for these.

"Nazi Subs"
Unfortunately, the first few seconds of this greeting got recorded over somehow, but the meat of the matter is still intact.

"Concert Tour"
Not one of my better efforts, but I put this one together right after I returned from touring with the Continental Brass and Singers, so it was timely, and the music fit perfectly.

"Español"
My friend Greg Ross helped me with a number of greetings, including this one and "Nazi Subs." He also helped on "The List," which I hope I still have laying around somewhere.

"Chinese Water Bath"
This is probably my favorite, and ranked up there in terms of getting the most messages simply about the greeting itself.

In fact, many of the greetings I recorded generated a flurry of messages and incoming calls. One gentleman left me a message that said something to the effect of "That is hands-down the most creative answering machine greeting I've ever heard. I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to share your number with some friends so they can hear your machine as well." I also got several responses that said something like "I dialed the wrong number, obviously, but I'm really glad I did." My college friends also took my greetings as an inspiration to be creative with the messages they left me.

Some of the more unusual messages that I still have on tape are these:

"Tuesday Afternoon"
"Paper"
"Bowl"
"Gibberish"
"What is the frequency?"

You'll also note that some of these recordings have some really awful line noise interference. Dialing up anywhere was a major pain, until I finally got someone from GTE on the phone who would listen to me play back one of these messages so he could hear the interference, and they came out and got it fixed immediately. Of course, it only took me 4 months to get to someone who would listen.

I think I still have some other tapes of outgoing greetings and other odd messages. As soon as I can find them, I'll record and post them as well.