It strikes me that there was a time we didn’t know what to do “at the beep”. A time when your family would come home to find messages on the answering machine with your grandparents saying things like “Hello? Hello? Howie? Hello?” (rustling…click).

Those days are gone. It’s been a quick jump from a jumbo machine with an actual tape to office, home and cellular voicemails that will find any means necessary of alerting you that you have a potentially life changing message waiting.

Exploring the history of voice messaging, I was amazed to find that the first machine was actually invented by a Mr. Willy M&uumlller. The year? 1935. No shit.

The story goes that the first answering machine was a three-foot-tall machine popular with Orthodox Jews who were forbidden to answer the phone on the Sabbath. The Ansafone, created by inventor Dr. Kazuo Hashimoto (Phonetel), was the first answering machine sold in the USA, beginning in 1960.

A few years and a few enhancements later – voicemail.

We all love it, right? Hell, even Gordon Matthews, the inventor of voicemail, was quoted as saying “when I call a business, I like to talk to a human”.

So that brings us to U.S. Patent No. 4,371,752, the pioneer patent for what evolved into voice mail. Gordon Matthews was the founder of VMX (Voice Message Express), the company in Dallas that produced the world’s first commercial voice mail system. Old Gordon became known as the “Father of Voice Mail.” He applied for a patent in 1979 for his voicemail invention and sold the first system to 3M.

Please fast forward 25 years and join me in pondering this. My 70 year old Auntie has a cell phone and a laptop. Can we agree that even our “older” generation now knows what to do at the beep?

I think so.

Why is it, then, that when I call someone and get voicemail, every fracking one results in an extra 15 seconds of my life being wasted with something like this:

“This is (blah blah) sorry I couldn’t (blah blah blah) leave a message” followed by “to leave a message, press one or stay on the line (blah blah blah blah blah), to page this person do (yadda yadda yadda)” and so on and so on and so on.

WHY do we need the second set of instructions? Oh, right, because the cell companies are run by THE MAN and he’s just trying to burn up my minutes.