Yes, yes indeedy, the long-awaited Actual Conversation has taken place between myself and MigraineGirl. I suppose we do sound alike, although my voice in my head is much lower than my actual voice is, as I have discovered, wincingly, upon hearing my voice on answering machines and such. It's one of the several reasons I have the defalt digital computery lady on my own answering machine. I hear her a lot, because I invariably screen. Please leave your message after the tone. I could do a perfect imitation if you could all hear me, which of course you can't.

I have also spoken to the (rather drunken at the time, hee) Bot...Friday. That was also quite lovely. She sounds very cute. And she giggles. I personally think that's adorable.

Back to the answering machine. I have finally located the Best Answering Machine in the entire universe. By which I mean it totally totally sucks, which is perfect.

See, I actually used to go through answering machines at an unprecedented rate. I know this is unusual. Most people buy an answering machine and keep it around for years. However, in my house, a combination of pets and the fact that I only actually own two normal land-line phones and both of them just have superlong cords caused the answering machine to be constantly dumped on the floor and yanked around and generally abused. They break easy, apparently.

So after a couple months several years ago with no answering machine, I finally got off my ass to go buy one. Not having an answering machine means, in point of fact, that no one can reach me via phone unless it's after 11, because I assume that only people I actually want to talk to will call that late. Needless to say it was a very frustrating several months for anyone who wanted to have a conversation with me over the phone.

And I go to Crazy Achmed's Electronic Shop (not the actual name of the store. But in New York City, you can actually typically refer to any electronics store that is not a brand store as such, since it's nearly always true. Similarly, everyone would know what one meant if one said "Crazy Hymie's Camera Shop".) These are all over the place. Most of them are sort of vaguely grey-market. All of them sell primarily crap. Much of it is brand-name, but by brands that you never would have imagined actually made the thing you are purchasing, such as a GE-brand phone, or a Whirlpool-brand pager. Okay, I made the last one up. But I really do have a GE phone.

And I select an answering machine. It cost $30. It was "digital". I never spend any money on answering machines due to aforementioned short life expectancy. If I spent much money on them I might have to take pains not to break the damn thing.

Bring home answering machine. Discover shortly thereafter, and to my intense glee, that this is quite possibly the single worst answering machine ever made.

Which makes it the best goddamn excuse I've ever gotten three years of mileage out of.

Among its many finer points are the following: if there is no battery in it (which there never is) and it comes unplugged, which happens often, it will forget all recorded messages, your recorded greeting thing, and the time and date. It also perpetually blinks its light to tell you that its battery doesn't exist, so you can't actually tell if there are any messages or not, which is fine, because I never actually listen to them anyway, at least not the ones left when I'm not there. It will arbitrarily cut people off at any point, including right at the beginning of a message, or whenever it apparently feels like it. I think it may be calculating how much memory it has left to store messages in depending on how much is already taken up, but the result of this is high hilarity while I'm listening to my mother leave her customary 10-minute messages because I'm in bed and don't feel like getting up to pick up the phone. She has gotten cut off a few times after recording herself saying silly and not very well-advised things into it. I've decided that it just doesn't like some people, and is also encouraging my mother to think a little harder before she opens her mouth.

Sometimes it will pick up after 1 ring, sometimes after 4. Sometimes it ignores calls completely and for no obvious reason. Sometimes it manages to convince the phones not to ring at ALL, and simply pick up the calls itself.

Also it has been dropped many, many times and continues to function in its same horribly inadequate fashion. All my others broke on contact with the floor.

Damn I love my answering machine. Someday I will have to actually note what kind it is so that if I ever do need to replace it I can get the same one.

Onto a new topic. Bot wrote today about an embarrassing moment with a boyfriend's parents. I actually have a similar story, although I was probably not nearly embarrassed enough.

I was 17, I think, yeah, 17. I was with my boyfriend at the time, E., the same one whose major positive character attribute was Van Ownership. The same one I drove to Florida with because it was snowing.

As one might imagine, upon returning home, we were both jobless and fairly homeless and incredibly, incredibly broke. So broke I am the only person (except him, of course) I know who knows exactly what happens when you don't have enough money to pay a bridge toll. So we were staying with his aunt in her small basement apartment, sleeping on the pullout couch in the living room.

His aunt was a lovely person. She was really, really great. And boy, do I owe her one (or fifty). She even shared her (nasty, but still) cigarettes with us when we were too broke to buy our own.

As one might imagine, it's complicated to have sex on a highly squeaky foldout couch bed thing. We actually managed that fairly well, and as far as we know, she never heard us, her bedroom being all the way at the other end of the apartment.

At the time, I had a pair of standard-issue police handcuffs that I used for...well, you can imagine. Some time later one of the dogs in my life peed on them and that was pretty gross so I had to throw them out (only thing worse than rusty handcuffs is pee-rusted handcuffs). But anyway. Usually I was the one in the cuffs. But this night for some reason E wanted to be the one in the cuffs. Luckily as this was still in its experimental phase we were both still clothed, except that he had his wrists cuffed to the metal bar at the end of the bed.

...which is when his aunt chooses to wander out and say hi or something.

Damn, that was funny. Watching this 6-foot-four guy trying REALLY hard to look as if he's just lounging with his hands inexplicably stretched WAY out over his head under a pillow, and kind of trying to turn on his side. As if that just happened to be the position he chose. Not to mention upside-down on the bed, feet at the head end. Hah! I nearly peed my pants right there and then, trying very, very hard not to crack the fuck up while keeping up some kind of reasonable conversation with his aunt.

I'm laughing now. Poor guy, HE was mighty embarrassed. I thought the whole thing was about as funny as it got.

Now I really have to get back to my document-writing. We need some new work. Cross your fingers for us...

- onehanded