Inane Answering Message Day

What the day is

Inane Answering Message Day is observed on January 30. It mocks the elaborate outgoing message, a form that flourished for roughly two decades and then vanished.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. The conditions that produced the phenomenon are clear enough.

Home answering machines became affordable in the late 1970s and were common through the 1980s and 1990s. The outgoing message was a genuinely novel thing: a short recording, made by a household, played to everyone who called, that could be redone as often as you liked. It was the only broadcast medium most families had ever controlled. The results were predictable and included musical numbers, scripted sketches, children coached through several takes, and the perennial joke of pretending to answer and then revealing the recording.

The machines themselves mattered to how people used the telephone. Call screening was new, and the etiquette around it was unsettled and frequently argued about, since standing beside the machine listening to who was calling before deciding to pick up was both obviously sensible and faintly rude.

What ended it was the shift from calling a place to calling a person. A household phone was answered by whoever was in, so the greeting was collective and could be a performance. A mobile phone belongs to one person, who is expected to answer it, and the voicemail greeting has correspondingly collapsed into the default recorded by the network. Most people under thirty have never recorded one at all, and a substantial share of calls to mobiles now go unanswered on purpose with no message left.

How to take part

• Record an actual greeting on your voicemail. Most people still have the network default.
• Keep it short and say your name, which is the entire useful function.
• Leave a voicemail for someone rather than texting, purely for the novelty.
• Ask an older relative what their family's message said. Many remember word for word.
• Resist the sketch. The day is named inane for a reason.