Outgoing message

In college, most of my friends experienced the shock of “new” when they discovered living outside their parents’ domain. Although a lot of college-life was new to me, I didn’t get the more banal jolts since most of my friends in high school had been older than me. The “first apartment on your own,” “first time you got to eat dessert before dinner,” “first time no one gave you a curfew,” these were some of the things my friends went wild over but that didn’t give me such a rise.

One girl I knew got drunk for the first time at the beginning of school at a frat party, and she kept tapping her front teeth with the mouth of her beer bottle. “Oh my god, I can’t feel my teeth!” Tap-tap-tap.

I kept telling her, “You really need to stop. That’s going to hurt a lot in the morning.”

She just laughed and kept tap-tap-tapping. I didn’t know her well enough to learn if she woke up with a headache and dental pain, which is a shame, because I’d like to be tsk-tsking her right now.

One new find for my first dorm roommate was the outgoing answering machine message. She thrilled that she would get to record her own silly message instead of her parents’ stodgy old practical one reciting name and phone number.

“Ooh! Let’s say we can’t answer the phone because we’re smoking pot!”

“I don’t know, I don’t think my parents would think that was funny,” I said.

“Come on, that’s so funny!”

“What if we say we’re out doing shots of tequila? I don’t think my parents would mind that as much.” (Lie.)

She said, “Oh no, I got caught drunk-driving in high school and my parents would kill me.”

In the end, we settled on something offensive to everyone, because I just couldn’t convince her that it didn’t have to be funny. The whole world of callers would be hearing that message: parents, deans, siblings, a professor or two—not just fellow freshmen. The answering machine shouldn’t be the battleground for our ultimate statement of frosh freedom, but she bullied me into being less uptight.

In the end, we did a two-person act:

Both together: We can’t come to the phone right now
Roommate: because we’re out smoking pot
Me: and shooting tequila,
Both together: but leave a message and we’ll call you back when we’re sober. (Roommate: giddy laughter.)
(Me: tense laughter.)

It was dreadful. Sorry mom and dad, I didn’t mean to irritate you when I was a freshman. I got all the irritants out of my system in high school, so there wasn’t much left for intentional irksomeness in college.

I actually remember one of my relatives saying, “What in the hell does that answering machine say?” and I had to placate and placate that it wasn’t my idea and that I tried to change her mind. I wish I had been bold enough to change the message while she was gone. It would have saved me a college first I didn’t relish, first impression.