...my dear old friend Machiavelli Smurts, who claims I changed his life with one little snarky comment. A few weeks ago I had the occasion to call Smurts about a joint venture we were kicking around for this summer: see which one of us could go the longest posing in the manner of Rodin's The Thinker sculpture directly underneath The Cleveland Museum of Art's Thinker sculpture. Anyway, Smurts, who purports to be a much busier man than in reality he is (the posing thing was his idea), didn't take my call, so I had to deal with his voicemail: "On purpose or by accident, you have reached the electronic answering device of Machiavelli Van Halen Smurts III. Please leave a detailed message, and I will call you back when I find the time." Now obviously the entire "outgoing" message is absurd, but for the first time in thousands of similar messages from dozens of people, I was struck by that admonition to leave a "detailed" message.
"Detailed?" my message began, "you want a detailed message? What kind of Fascist directive is that? Call me, asshole. Detail that. And there's a comma, signifying a pause, between me and asshole, asshole. What kind of details do you need? With today's phones, the caller's number is already there for you, and the time they called. Anybody you know is going to obviously tell you what they need to tell you, and anybody who doesn't know you either has their own agenda and thus will leave what details they want, regardless of your instructions, or they're somebody you don't want to know, let alone call back, so telling them to leave a detailed message is just inviting more aggravation on your part. Cut the pedantic, totalitarian BS and just tell them to leave a message, if they so choose. By the way, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe--a relative of yours, Mach?--said, 'God is in the details.' He was talking about art and design, not phone messages. There are no atheists in foxholes, and no gods leave phone messages. So change your life, and if not that, change your outgoing message. Bye."
Turns out I was just calling Machiavelli Smurts to share an oldie but goodie joke: What do you call a dog with no hind legs and steel testicles? Sparky. So when he didn't call back, I didn't think much about it. But my gosh, two weeks later, when Machiavelli Smurts did call back, I was hardly prepared for the onslaught. Naturally, I was blogging at the time he called (nobody interrupts my devotion to you, dear blogee) so I got to hear what he had to say via his excited, and, well, obviously detailed message:
"Dude, you've changed my life. You're amazing. The message thing. The detailed message thing. I was paralyzed for like two days after I heard it. It really made me question everything. Well, not everything, but a lot. You're so right. Not only is it obnoxious to tell people to leave a detailed message, but it's pointless. I did a detailed analysis of my incoming phone calls, and, for empiricism's sake, I took a closer look at how I leave messages. Now you know I catalogue every phone call I make and receive, don't you? That's part of the reason I don't have time to read your blog, let alone make anyone's birthday party. Do you realize that 90%, with a margin of debatableness of +/- 4.5%, of my phone calls are practically 100% meaningless? Ergo, the overwhelming majority of phone messages, given and received, are utter nonsense. Forget god, man, the devil is what lurks in the details of nonsense. Example, and this is a mere ordinary example, nothing extreme. 'Mach, dude, I'm in the beer cave at Speedway. What's the name of that new malt liquor you were telling me about? Call me back before I freeze.' I mean, really, I don't need those details. We're all getting older. There's less and less time to spend in frivolous conversation, especially when it's a monologue delivered to somebody's else's recording device. Besides, the whole 'detailed' thing is so bland. I've been experimenting. I've asked people to leave vague and ambiguous messages. I've suggested they leave messages totally irrelevant to me. I've invited people to leave cryptic messages. Heavily accented messages, nostalgic messages, fire and brimstone messages, Victorian era messages, messages as if they were Jane Austen, messages as if their mouths were filled with Malley's bacon, covered in chocolate!, all sorts of messages that are anything but 'detailed.' Dude, I've never had so much fun and gained so much enlightentment from listening to my voicemails. I'm this close to doing away with cable for good. I can't thank you enough."
So I've improved the life of someone's life which was in need of improving. I deserve a few days off, I believe.
The Replacements-Answering Machine
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