Leaving a coherent voicemail can be difficult. It’s an art. Quite frankly, it’s not as simple as it seems and can be particularly terrifying as it is, in one sense, a type of public speaking straight from the nerve-racking classrooms of high school. In most situations, a name, quick reason for calling and a call back number is all that is required. That’s it. Ten seconds or less is all that’s needed. And yet, there is a kind of paranoid fear of any type of awkward silence on the part of the caller. The open ended nature of a voicemail creates the need to constantly be talking, as if a succinct message would be disastrous.

This awkward form of communication affects me constantly. Back during my freshman year in college, I left a voicemail for one of my new fraternity brothers. Skip forward to our Formal later that Spring and the Taylor Awards, meant to be humorous, were being handed to a select few brothers. Turns out the brother I called was the same as for whom the awards were named. At one point, I heard, “And the Award for Most Polite Voicemail Leaver” (or something like that) goes to…Jimmy Ohio!”

He explained how, surely because I was from Ohio, I left the most polite and formal voicemail he’d ever heard. It included my name, please and thank you’s, possibly even an over-explanation of who I was…

And once the rambling starts, it’s like a heavy cheese wheel rolling down a steep European countryside hill. Once it gets going at autobahn speeds, it’s impossible to stop.

We’ve all been here in some way!

and then there’s the conversation after the voicemail…