I've made the decision to retire my ancient answering machine. It was a great answering machine, a PhoneMate 4300, and I've never found anything that I liked as well. The problem was that the tapes were wearing out. Now I could have replaced the message tape, but the continuous loop greeting tape is impossible to find. Although mini-tapes are still available if you look hard enough, my machine used full sized tapes.

What finally made me make the switch was the phone company began offering packages of features that gave me more for less money. Who can resist that, right? Even more irresistable was the 50% increase in my broadband speed. Another part of the package was voice mail. I decided to try it and found to my delight that my Uniden phones (TCX 805's) have a blinking light when there's a message waiting. If I glance at any phone I can see that there's a message. Really cool!

Of course what I need to do now is to record one of my pre-recorded gag messages onto my voice mail. The one on my answering machine went like this: "Hello, I am a digitally enhanced answering unit. Who are you? Please leave a message after my obligatory tone and we will respond as soon as humanly possible. Chou baby."

Yeah, I've got to have that back!

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  ¶ 9:20 PM