Last weekend I was visiting Shannon, who was having a small get-together with Dwayne and Andre and me and Matt, who put in a late cameo appearance, when it was decided that we should head over to Dwayne's to get his Playstation and some games. We all piled into a car and drove over there, where Shannon chose to park completely across the sidewalk because it seemed the thing to do at the time.

While we were up there dealing with a floor that has more of a slant than any floor reasonably should, Shannon decided that he was going to change Dwayne's answering maching message. The existing message was kind of weird, spoken in a falsetto or fake accent or some combination thereof, and it had some mangled English, a sentence along the lines of "I can't come to the phone because I'm currently indisposed of." The message had to go.

Shannon searched until he found the phone in the bedroom, where he grabbed the answering machine in both hands and held it to his face to speak directly into it. Then he used a British nanny voice, like Mrs. Doubtfire or something, to recite the standard "Hello, you have reached the residence of..." He was near the end of the standard bit when the answering slipped out of his hands and banged off the desk. He slipped into his normal voice and said, "Dwayne, I'm trying to break your answering machine."

"Don't do that," Dwayne said. "That cost me like 14 bucks."

"If I break it I'll buy you a new one," Shannon told him.

Dwayne shook his head. "No, man, you don't understand. Fourteen dollars is like three weeks' food money."

When he said that, I started laughing. A moment later, we heard, "BEEP. Message recorded."

After a moment of staring at each other, we all cracked up this time. We played back the message two or three times in a row and laughed every time. it was just that perfect.

Then Shannon kept fiddling with the machine, and propmtly erased it. *sigh*

Oh well. Easy come easy go.