{"id":18089,"date":"2019-08-24T10:26:06","date_gmt":"2019-08-24T17:26:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=18089"},"modified":"2019-08-24T10:26:06","modified_gmt":"2019-08-24T17:26:06","slug":"the-old-message","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2019\/08\/24\/the-old-message\/","title":{"rendered":"The old message"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

In 2008, I stayed at the Howard Johnson in Springfield, Pennsylvania. I had a bad experience there<\/a>; the card-key reader on the door of my room stopped working in the middle of the night (so I was locked out of my room), and the staff couldn\u2019t do anything to fix it, and the owner handled it poorly when he eventually arrived in the morning.<\/p>\r\n

After I got home from that trip, I got a phone call from the owner (at least I think it was the owner); he left a message on my voicemail.<\/p>\r\n

And the whole experience had been so stressful that I couldn\u2019t bring myself to even listen to the message. I figured that it could have been the apology that the owner hadn\u2019t given me in person, or it could have been him continuing to be annoying. And I figured that some day I would listen to the message, but I couldn\u2019t cope just then.<\/p>\r\n

So I left the message on my answering machine.<\/p>\r\n

Over the past 11 years, I accumulated some other messages that I never deleted, though I did listen to those. One, for example, was an unfamiliar voice that just said \u201cJedediah\u201d and then hung up. A couple were from organizations that I donate money to, expressing interest in getting to know me better. And so on.<\/p>\r\n

So I\u2019ve lately had a total of 6 messages on my answering machine that I never delete, most of which had been there for years.<\/p>\r\n

Earlier this week, I re-listened to the five that weren\u2019t from the HoJo guy, and I decided that I really didn\u2019t need to keep them any more, and I deleted them.<\/p>\r\n

And then a day or two later, I took a deep breath and finally listened to the HoJo message.<\/p>\r\n

It turned out that the guy was just leaving me his phone number and asking me to call him.<\/p>\r\n

So I deleted that one too, and now I\u2019m at answering-machine-message zero for the first time in a little over eleven years.<\/p>\r\n

Having that message sitting on my answering machine hasn\u2019t been a big source of stress in the past few years, but I think it has been a tiny one. It\u2019s a relief to have gotten rid of it.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[116],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-self-improvement"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18089"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18090,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18089\/revisions\/18090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}