We Had Influence, So We Must Be Influencers

Kevin Brown

A few years before the internet became something that showed up on college campuses but not yet in people’s homes, my college roommate and I went viral with the technology of our day: the answering machine. Before our junior year of college, our dorm was still outfitted with hallway phones (three per floor) for us to use. When we came back to campus in the fall of 1990, each room was outfitted with its own phone jack, a major development in cross-campus communication. While most people talked about their phones or the conversations they had on them, only our answering machine messages spread across the campus.

Erik and I often joked that our machine was more popular than we were, but we also knew we were proud of that distinction. We often told each other (and other people) stories of students we barely knew, if at all, calling our room, surprised when we picked up. They asked if they could call back, and if we could let our phone go to the answering machine instead. We always complied.

As with today’s TikTok or YouTube stars, we spent days, even weeks, coming up with new messages for the machine, always trying to surpass whatever we had come up with before. Once we had established a reputation, we had to continue growing and experimenting with being able to keep callers coming back. We didn’t have statistics on likes or followers, but we felt it whenever we crossed campus where we heard people talking about our messages or even had people call out to us using a phrase or line from one of them.

Looking back now, of course, I see the messages for what they are, and the reality is they weren’t anything more or less original than most other college students would have developed.However, they represented inside jokes between Erik and I or ones only students at our small (700ish students)college would get. We used as much technology as we had at our disposal to produce what we thought of as quality work. We were creative in a medium that nobody else we knew was exploring. It was probably the first time in my life I tried any kind of creativity as I was crafting stories

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before I ever tried to write.

One of the most popular messages was our attempt to be meta, to draw attention to the medium itself, to let people know we knew they were listening.

When the message began, I started by saying, “Hello.” There was a brief pause, and we knew people would think I had answered the phone. We wanted them to start talking, to make them think they had reached a real person, not the message they probably intended to reach, anyway.

Erik then cut in, “What are you doing answering the phone? We’re trying to rob this place.” It was not a particularly interesting setup as the joke was essentially the opening “hello,” but we continued the charade, making it clear Erik and Kevin weren’t there which is why we—the robbers—were there, and that callers could leave a message if we left the answering machine there.

It was a juvenile prank at the beginning, nothing more, but we spent time trying to craft the motivation of the robbers (why would they answer the phone?) and the character (was his character angry at me for answering the phone? If so, why would he continue the message instead of just cutting it off right then?). We knew we had to follow the standard format of a message and tell people to leave a message after the beep, but we needed to do so in character, so we had to adjust the story we were crafting to get to that particular ending.

We were also playing on the trope of the time that if one tells callers they’re not home, somebody could come and rob them. That line of thinking never made sense to either of us as people simply replaced the fact that they weren’t home with a euphemism that meant the same thing: “We can’t come to the phone right now.” There was some belief that potential robbers were calling people’s homes (without cell phones, of course, so they would have to be at a payphone somewhere), trying to find empty houses, then driving there to rob them, while hoping the people hadn’t returned by then. We took an absurd idea and made an absurd message out of it. Not surprisingly, I had just switched my major to English that year, and I was reading writers from the 1960s, especially Kurt Vonnegut. I saw writers playing with their medium in a way my classes never showed me; Erik and I took that idea and applied it to the medium we had found for our creativity. Given how much he loved phone calls, he probably would have enjoyed influencing our messages.

Given the novelty of answering machines during this era, it’s no surprise that people sold pre-made,

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supposedly clever or funny messages. The most famous of these attempts is the “Nobody’s home” message set to the opening of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. Or there was the borderline rap version with lyrics such as, “You gotta leave your name/gotta leave your number/gotta WAIT FOR THE BEEP!” The tape, which also included a Boogie Woogie and Can-Can number, had a total of seven different messages for only $14.95 (plus $3 shipping and handling, of course).

Erik and I refused to allow others to make such messages for us, so we created our own including musicallyenhanced versions. Erik played guitar, and he could create most of the tracks we needed; however, rather than using a well-known song, Erik would play guitar riffs of his creation, and I would do something in the background to go along with it. Such an approach led to our other most popular message, one that came because we had run out of ideas completely, but we knew we needed a new message.

Given our personalities, Erik often played the straight man to my more manic personality, something any student on such a small campus would know about both of us. In this message, we played the music Erik had created, and he did the main narration.

He began, “You have reached romper room number 107...” while I was in the background running around the room, creating as much chaos as I could; I turned the TV and other music on and off while trying to quite literally bounce off the walls.

As he continued, “Our current residents are currently occupied and cannot come to the phone, but please leave a message...” I began bouncing on and off my bed, leading to our grand finale.

As he wrapped up the part about leaving a message, I leapt off a chair onto his bed, shouting “Sky King!” which turned into a repeated “ing, ing, ing, ing” as I bounced until I stopped, and he shut off the recorder.

I realize as I write this out there’s no way to communicate how much fun this was to create or why anybody found it interesting, but both are true.

Over the next few days, while we were in class, people kept calling and calling. One aspect of this period strikes me as particularly odd though. While people would comment on our messages when they saw us, or we would hear comments through the grapevine, nobody would ever leave a message commenting on our messages. Thus, we would get back to find hangups on the machine or only find out

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later how many people had been calling rather than simply leaving a message to say, “Hey, good job on the new message.”

It was as if they were curious to see what we would do with the technology, but they were uncomfortable using it themselves to share their feelings with us.

The current generation has partly gotten over this hesitation with all of their likes and comments on other people’s creations, and my high school students are quite open about what they see online when they’re in each others’ presence. In fact, they’ll often show each other snaps or videos and talk about them or laugh at them, creating a type of communal event out of a technology that doesn’t naturally lend itself to such interactions. However, they also seldom comment directly on somebody’s creation in a positive way, sharing it with their friends or tapping a heart, but not reaching out to the creator and celebrating the work as appreciators to the creator.

I would have enjoyed hearing their voices on our machine, giving us the equivalent of a thumbs up or a like but with a real person’s tone behind it. That’s what most creators want, of course. We want to know that people are reading or seeing or hearing our work, that they look forward to seeing what we do next, that they appreciate what we’ve just spent weeks, months, even years on. Most creative endeavors are rather lonely in that we sit with our equipment (whether pencil and paper or paint and easel or the latest technology) and create something from largely nothing. We create, though, to form a connection, to express a thought or feeling we have been thinking about or feeling for quite some time, and we hope those ideas or emotions find a place in somebody else who encounters a work. While Erik and I enjoyed the creation in and of itself, we started because we wanted a connection with the people who were calling us to actually talk to us.

The only way we know we have created, though, is to hear directly from those who encounter our art.As an appreciator, as well as a creator, I’ve started reaching out to artists whose work I appreciate by sending them a note or email just to say what their work has meant to me. Not surprisingly, they often communicate back in some way. We never go beyond one or two exchanges as that’s not the point. Instead, they know that at least one person found their work meaningful.

The closest I’ve come to that feeling was when I had a poem featured on The Writer’s Almanac. For roughly thirty-six hours, I had people

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from around the country sending me emails that told me what my poem had meant to them. I received one from a high school friend I hadn’t spoken to in more than a decade as she had been surprised to hear my name on the radio. Part of the thrill of that day and a half was that I felt a little bit famous, of course, but it was much more that I realized my writing had reached some people out there, that they had found it meaningful if only for a few minutes.

I don’t much miss the answering machine these days, though I do miss the clever messages. Many people don’t even leave voicemails anymore as we can see our missed calls, and we’ll always return the call of those people we know, even if they don’t leave a message. But they’ll probably just send us a text, anyway. I also miss the connection, though, the smiles and laughs Erik and I created that we heard about second-hand (and third- and fourth-), knowing we created something that people were willing to go out of their way to find.

We were saying, “Hello,” and we knew they were listening, even if they never said it back to us.

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