DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

A couple of years back I opened my own web engineering business. I had two employees and not quite that many clients. But appearances are everything, especially when there literally isn’t anything else.

The public’s first experiences with my fledgling firm would be the company’s website and its answering service. The website I could handle… but I needed to find a voice mail system.

I could have gone with the phone company’s service, but disliked the idea of renting when I could buy instead. Also I had a vision of a menu-driven, feature-rich voice response system, complete with digitized greetings, multiple mailboxes, and the like. My goal was to make my company sound bigger, more experienced, and more capable than “one guy working out of his extra bedroom, and his wife who handles the books.” (Maybe, I reasoned, nobody would notice that the only person within this large company they ever actually spoke to was me.)

The solution took form at MacWorld Expo when I discovered a telephony toolkit. It wasn’t a voice mail application, no; that would have been too simple. I bought a software development environment that would let me create my own telephony application. I’d be able to piece together prompts and menus, passwords, mailboxes, voice samples, even synthesized speech into a real Frankenstein of a voice-mail system.

And so I did. It sounded and functioned just like a commercial system. It was infinitely modifiable, and I spent a near-infinite amount of time modifying it. It had some neat features, one of which I was especially proud of even though the few times it was used it didn’t actually work very well. If the app was Frankenstein, this feature was the big chrome bolt on the neck. I called it the “housepager.”

The idea was that clients needing emergency response could dial a specific, secret extension to trigger an all-points bulletin — to rouse me from whatever quiet corner of the house I might have skulked off to when I wasn’t actively monitoring their mission-critical services. Because the Macintosh hosting the voice mail system also controlled the house’s lights and appliances, I was able to have this 9-1-1 extension flip lights on and off throughout the house, and announce in an ominous robotic voice, “E-mer-gen-cy! E-mer-gen-cy!” through the office stereo.

As it turns out, I’d underestimated my ability to sleep through emergencies. But this didn’t detract from the geek appeal of having built my own solution.

Fast-forward a couple years… my best client had hired me as a full-time employee long ago… I’d disabled the housepager because my first task as a full-time employee was hiring a systems administrator whose primary job responsibility is to wear a pager 24x7… and I was stuck with this 10-year-old Mac whose disk drive sounds like a Dremel tool, hosting a creaky old voice-mail application that has had most of its whizzy features bypassed because, any more, all I need is a simple answering machine.

The noise is easy to forget. I’ve habituated it. But every few months I realize that even after significant previous efforts to lower my office’s ambient noise below OSHA-mandated safety levels, or even, for a start, below the pain threshhold, there are still a few pieces of ridiculously noisy equipment here. I considered buying a modern, quiet hard drive for the old Mac. Such a project would have taken a day to implement, between the shopping, OS install, file transfer… but still, it was do-able… and then I spied our old, abandoned answering machine, decommissioned because the wireless handsets were plagued by static.

What a perfect answer! The Mac, which could be donated and used productively elsewhere, was too big, too loud, and too clumsy for this application. The Siemens answering machine was small, sleek, silent, operated with about one-third as much electricity, and most importantly had no practical value in any other context because it is no longer a functional telephone. Not only would I be improving my voice-mail system, I’d be saving energy, and recycling. You have to love that. At least, if you’re me. Which I am.

Next in my hardware-exchange crosshairs is the 133 Mhz PS/2 that serves as the router and firewall for my office LAN. Unlike the old Mac, this dinosaur has no redeeming qualities. I had to get an exception to the county zoning ordinance when I set it up because it qualifies as heavy industrial machinery. The EPA stops by quarterly to inspect it — it sucks so much power, and generates so much noise and heat that if it gets any more earth-hostile they’ll just declare it a superfund site. Its replacement, a mini-itx system I put together last Spring, has been sitting here for six months waiting for the day’s attention it needs to be put into service. That day comes this weekend.