The following is what people should not do.....

I have a very good friend from high school who I am not going to name here, but she is the focal point of what I am going to be writing about here. I spent most of the last two years of my high school life with this girl, and we remained close when she went away to college, and I came to the city. Now if she is not in the city then she is at home in Poughkeepsie, so I get to see her fairly often.

Sometimes she will call me when she is on the train or walking back to her dorm, and if she leaves me a voicemail it isn't always neccesary to return the call because she was just calling me to kill time. But that was not the case in the particular instance that I am referring to here. My phone vibrates to tell me that I have a message, and it is from this friend. Her voice was stone cold serious, and she slowly told me that I needed to call her back right away because she had something very important to tell me. I was convinced that it was something horrible. This was not the way that she normally left me messages, and she wouldn't have had such a lack of emotion if it were good news. With my morbid and neurotic mind the first thing that I think is that someone has died. I give myself a moment to mentally prepare myself for what could potentially be terrible news.

I dial her phone number hoping that she is going to pick up, and we won't have to start the voicemail game.

"Hello." She said.
"What's wrong?" I ask, not wanting to engage in any type of small talk whatsoever.
"What are you talking about?" she asked inquistively.
"You just left me a message that sounded like you had to tell me that someone was dead. You said that there was something very important that you had to tell me."
"Oh...that. My friend got a boob job, and I didn't know who else to tell. Isn't that funny?"

I suppose that is a funny story. I might have chuckled and asked her about it had she left me an approrpiate message, but instead she essentially tricked me into thinking that someone was dead in order to get me to call her back, which I would have done anyway if she had said that she had something funny or interesting to tell me. I certainly would have returned her call within a day.

What is the lesson that I want you to take away from this story? Leave information appropriate voice mails. If something bad has happened, then tell the person that you need them to call you, and that it is important. If you do say this, what you have to tell them should not be that someone that they have met at most once has gotten their boobs done. This is not very important.

Use this as a guide to leaving voice mails if you are unsure.

:)