You may want to play the answering machine for various reasons, maybe they have done you wrong and you want to give as good as you get or just for pure enjoyment.

Maybe it’s because he’s from Oakland and had to put up with Al Davis all those years, but Chester the Spoon has some advice for folks who don’t like answering machines. He suggest you make many, many repeated calls over a thirty or forty-minute period and leave either no message or rude, untraceable ones. The idea is to overload the machine and, perhaps, make the mark miss an important call.

A more direct method, which comes from Alik Allotjka, requires access to your mark’s answering machine, which, of course, would be easy in a business office. But don’t forget social occasions when you might have a free run of his or her home. It’s a great way to pay back someone who’s used a telephone to abuse you in one form or another.

Prerecord an answering- machine message of your own design in your mark’s name. Make it awful, crude or whatever would do the most damage. Substitute this tape for the one already in the machine. Do it during a time period when you know it will get maximum play.

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