By Chris Cosci

You pick up the phone and dial the number. The ringing starts. After a couple of rings, the thought creeps into your mind that the person you are calling may not pick up the phone. A moment of silence. Then, the recorded voice begins: "Hi, you have reached..."

Panic creeps in. As the voice goes on, you realize you have about fifteen to thirty seconds to put your thoughts together into a short, concise, and coherent message. The pressure mounts. You debate whether to just hang up and try again later, or face the challenge of the answering machine. The machine emits a beep, and the race begins.

Suddenly, you start rattling off all the information you can think of, hoping that you don't sound long-winded or confusing. When you're done, you hang up, and it's all over. The message is left. There's no turning back. Whatever you said has been recorded and will stay there on the machine, with its light blinking endlessly until the owner presses a button, releasing your message from captivity.

Answering machines have been around for a long time, but it seems that leaving a message is still a challenge for many people. It doesn't matter how many messages we've left in our lifetime. We still fall into some of the same traps.

For example, it is not uncommon for one's brain to suddenly freeze up, causing a temporary memory gap. These gaps are often filled with such brilliant observations as "I guess you're not home" or "I just thought I'd leave you a message."

On the other end of the spectrum, some people will have too much to discuss, which leads to a long message that tries to cover everything. "So, I wanted to talk about this weekend. I was thinking that maybe we could figure out where we want to go, where we want to meet, what time we're leaving, if we're going to have lunch, if we should ask Tom if he wants to come, if we should take my car or yours, what the weather is going to be like, what phase of the moon it's going to be, is anything happening in the city, did you see anything in the paper, stuff like that."

Some people will leave what sounds like a life story. "Hey, I was just calling to see how things were going. I've been having one of those weeks. I got a flat tire on Sunday driving to the supermarket. You know I hate going to the store on Sunday, but I was out of milk. Anyway, I was driving to the store, when my rear left... no wait... my rear right tire went out. So, I had to wait there for half an hour until someone came to help. Can you believe that? Then on Monday..."

Luckily, many machines automatically cut off messages after a minute. So, the caller will be just rattling away when another beep sounds, indicating time's up - thanks for calling. Of course, this doesn't stop the really desperate people. They just call back and leave another message, starting where they left off.

What I find most difficult is ending a message. In a normal conversation, the two parties exchange goodbyes. In a message, you tend to want to say goodbye, but at the same time, try not to because there's no one to really say goodbye to. So, even after leaving an elegant message, you can completely fall apart at the end. "Okay, so, we'll talk about this later... umm... okay... that's it. Thanks. Umm. Talk to you later. Uh, bye."

Why is this so difficult? By now, we should all be experts. I think people put too much thought into leaving a message. I think every message should be exactly the same. "Hey, it's Chris. My number is... Call me back. Thanks." Of course, you would say your own name instead of Chris. Unless your name is Chris - in which case, you can leave it the way it is.

And always leave your phone number. Okay. Well, that's it for now. Uh. Thanks for reading... umm... yeah, that's all. Okay. Thanks. Um. Bye.