Please Leave Your Message After the Tone

Sometimes, even the most composed and self-assured of us can stumble. Sometimes, this can be a more literal stumble; tripping up stairs or catching your toe on a crack in the sidewalk are two common means of bringing embarrassment and shame upon oneself. These little incidents create a painfully awkward situation for all parties involved. You’ve just shown your clumsiness and lack of basic motor skills in public, and those watching are caught in the strange in-between of not knowing whether to laugh, ask if you’re OK, or just ignore you. Fortunately, these moments often last for just a fleeting instant before everyone moves on and forgets about it. However, when your “misstep” is not a simple bodily malfunction, the ramifications can be long-lasting.

There is no greater example of personal gaffes immortalized than the voicemail. Perhaps this is why many of my friends steadfastly refuse to leave them. Almost all of us have cell phones and we obviously see the missed call, so isn’t that enough? Why waste the time calling *86, punching in our password, listening to the recording, and calling the person back when we could simply skip the first three steps? It’s fair to say that we all say things to ourselves we would not say to others. And, since leaving a voicemail is really just talking to oneself, why bother taking the chance of saying something you’ll immediately regret? If you want to see what I mean, listen below to Sportscenter anchor Scott Van Pelt’s strange message to a woman he met in a bar:


Because there is no room for silence in the land of the voicemail, leaving long, rambling messages has become a frequently realized nightmare of message-leavers. All too often, we stray from the topic, talk for too long, or simply have no clue how to say goodbye. It’s so easy to psych yourself out mid-sentence that by the end of the message even the calmest of us can be reduced to a bumbling, stuttering mess. Sometimes, the degree of freakout is so great that we forget that you can simply press “1” when you’re done at the end of the message to re-record it. This will be your greatest weapon in the battle to leave a quality, succinct voicemail; it is the ultimate way of saving yourself from yourself. Will Ferrell’s Frank the Tank is a master of this technique, as heard below:
(Link) View more Frank Ricard Sound Clips and Old School Sound Clips
Sometimes, though, you really do need to leave a message. If the matter at hand is so pressing that you can ill-afford to have someone waste their precious time calling you back, a quick and simple message must suffice. The reigning champion here is the world’s most famous adulterer, Mr. Eldrick “Tiger” Woods:


No matter what your voicemail style, be it anywhere from the long-winded “Van Pelt” to the short and sweet “Tiger” to not leaving one at all, as long as you deeply concentrate and focus on the task at hand, you should be able to avoid embarrassing yourself. Now all that’s left is to watch out for those cracks in the sidewalk.