"Hello, it's me. I have a question for you. <unintelligible>. It's not an emergency or anything, but <unintelligible> call me back right away when you get this. I'm going to leave the phone on for awhile in case you happen to get this right away."
Okay, time for a side anecdote. This will surely be repeated at some future point because it is so truly bizarre. My parents keep the ringer to their phone off. They have only a landline with no cell service. Their explanation is that they "get too many phone calls from solicitors." They also don't use paid voice mail because they don't see the point. Instead, they continue to rely on an ancient answering machine that uses a tape. They've had it for about 20 years. It doesn't always work.
About 10 years ago, I bought them a digital answering machine so they could at least have something more reliable. They used it for a week and then went back to the old machine because they thought the messages were too hard to understand, and they also had no way to permanently save messages if they needed one. Now, in all of the time they've had an answering machine, I don't know that they've EVER permanently kept a message, but apparently the ability to keep the tape is an important feature to them. I guess you never know when the message you got from the hardware store might come in handy?
The end result of their insistence of keeping the ringer turned off, coupled with their incessant need to use highly outdated technology, is that one needs to follow a bizarre ritual in order to get in contact with my parents. First, you call. You wait for the machine to pick up and leave a message. You must specifically request a call back. You must avoid at all costs the term "I'll talk to you later" if you would like a call back. In my parents' language, "I'll talk to you later" means "I don't need a call back, and this statement overrides my previous request for a call back in this same message."
Next, you must wait anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 days to receive a call back. Therefore, it is important to specify the urgency of your message:
- "Please call me back right away, I have something important to talk to you about" ensures a call in the next hour or two; however, you must clarify that this is not an emergency.
- Failure to specify the non-emergency nature of your call results in receiving a call back from a very panicked father who is under the erroneous impression that your head is detached and bleeding and can be talked down from this state of terror only after several minutes of reassurance.
- "It's not important, I just have a question, call me when you get a chance" usually results in a call back later that day or the following day.
- At the same time, you should not attempt to discuss the specifics of the reason for your call in the message. If you do this, he will misunderstand everything you said.
Now that we're clear on the procedure necessary to make contact or schedule an appointment for visitation (drop-in visits are not appreciated), let's return to the main story. When my father says "I'm going to leave the phone on for awhile," this is an indicator that he really wants a call back right away. Nothing short of an important matter is worthy of turning the ringer on, even for only a few hours.
I called him back as soon as I got back to the office, approximately 10 minutes after receiving the message. A grand total of 15 minutes had passed since I missed the original call. This was, evidently, a short enough time frame to merit leaving the ringer on.
"Hey, I got your message. What's up?"
"Oh, it's okay now, I fixed it. I just had to unplug everything and plug it back in and set it back up to factory conditions and now it's working fine, I think. Can I call you if I have any more problems?"
At no point thus far has he actually told me what the problem was in the first place. I've now narrowed it down to something electronic, but what could it be?
"Sure... What happened?"
"The VCR wasn't working, and I couldn't record anything or watch anything. I didn't know what to do."
"Oh, okay. Yeah, if you have any more problems, call me back."
I went back to my desk and ate my lunch, not giving this strange conversation any further thought, until about two hours later when I received an email from my sister. She informed me that she had received a phone call from my father saying that his VCR wasn't working and he couldn't watch any of his recordings, so he wanted someone to come fix it right away.
It was 1:15 in the afternoon at this point. My job is very, very flexible with me, but when I imagined the conversation with my boss that began with "I need to go because my father's VCR is broken," every scenario that followed involved me being handed a cardboard box. My sister lives 3 hours away, so even if she has some kind of special "get out of work free" pass, she's not going to get there any sooner than I am if I work the rest of my day.
I replied to the email, letting her know that I'd be happy to head over there after I get off work in a few hours, but I really can't take off early to look at his VCR. I also let her know about the conversation I'd had with him two hours previously. At this point, we managed to determine that this was a simple miscommunication -- She had received a message from him earlier in the day, before he had resolved the issue. Just to be on the safe side, she called and left him a message to make sure all was well.
After I got off work, I spoke with her to see what happened. She did hear back from him and confirmed that the VCR was now working. However, we compared notes on the messages we'd received from my father from approximately the same time in the morning after his VCR broke, and the differences were remarkable. While he'd been calm and collected in the message he left me, specifying that it wasn't an emergency, he had been in a full panic when he called her. He'd been stammering and frightened, worried about what he would do without his recordings. This left us to speculate whether he'd called her first, then calmed down and called me, or whether he'd called me first, then worked himself into a panic during the 15 minutes it took for me to call him back.
In either event, fortunately, this particular crisis was averted. We wouldn't want my parents to go without their stories, now would we?
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