now i am always available

well, sort of.

some of you reading this may have tried to call me in the last 6 or 8 months. some of you may have heard my standard, "hello, this is sara" if you were fortunate enough to catch me during the few hours a day i am actually in my apartment. others of you probably faced one of two alternatives:

1) the phone just kept ringing, and ringing, and ringing, and ringing...
2) an answering machine picked up, and you heard my message, and left a message. or so you thought.

the answering machine i had been using was lent to me. i found out later (by pulling out the cassette tape and trying it in my stereo) that it was from at least as far back as 1994. i don't think it worked properly once. sometimes it picked up and played my recorded message. sometimes it didn't. sometimes it recorded messages, or so it appeared to those calling. but i never once heard any of those messages, because it would never play them for me, nor alert me to the fact that i had new messages! after listening to the cassette of messages from 1994, i'm pretty sure it never actually recorded anything relevant to me. so now lots of people think that i'm a big jerk because they called and left me messages and i never got back to them.

in come my parents, the GST auction, and a new reachability...

i told my parents about this dilemma (and they themselves experienced the frustration of unreturned calls more than once), and they agreed to look for an answering machine for me. as it turns out, the local christian school, where my mom is the principal, had its annual GST (goods, services, and talents) auction on saturday night, and there waiting for the highest bidder was a new fangled answering machine, complete with digital messaging and three (count 'em, three), separate mailboxes. (i don't need more than one. but still. if you do call and get the machine, just for fun you can choose to press "2" or "3" and surprise me by leaving a message in one of my other mailboxes. thrilling, i know.) at any rate, they thought of me, bought the answering machine, and the school got the money. what a deal!

so now, i am reachable at any time. well, at least you can always be sure to hear my lame-o answering machine message if i'm not home to answer the phone myself.