I was handed the phone by my boy and told, “Here, talk to him.” So I said, “Who am I speaking with?” The child on the other end said “Who am I speaking with. Whoever you are, you called this number 31 times in the last day.” Life with kids is always interesting.
Recently our 12 year old made friends with a boy from our church and the boy gave our 12 year old his phone number so we could call and invite him over some time. The day our boy received the phone number he immediately went home and tried calling the number. I saw him make the call and hang up and figured nobody answered. I told him to wait until at least the next day before calling again.
The next day our boy came to me with the phone and asked me, “What number does he want me to give him?” I didn’t understand and tried to get him to explain. He told me every time he tried to call his friend, he would try talking to his friend when he picked up, but then his friend wouldn’t respond to my boy’s questions and kept asking for a number. Understanding the problem, I tried to explain what was happening to my boy but he wouldn’t listen and made me call his friend to hear for myself what was happening. As expected, after 4 rings, the answering machine picked up and asked me to leave a message including my name and number. At this point I laughed pretty hard realizing my boy had never encountered an answering machine in his life before and that’s why he was so confused. I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t actually a person answering the phone but a prerecorded message and that if he left a message they would call back.
I thought the problem was solved and it was just a minor miscommunication… until the next day when my boy’s friend told me we had tried calling their home 31 times! And the funniest part of the conclusion to this whole episode is that after I handed the phone to my boy so he could finally talk to his friend on the phone, he talked briefly to his friend and hung up. He then immediately redialed his friends number, waited for his friend to pick up, said “Just checking that this works”, and hung up again. So maybe it wasn’t only his first experience with an answering machine, but one of his first experiences with a phone too!
Posted on August 30, 2011 by Ryan
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