Dobleve

Some things I used to take for granted I don’t any more. One of them is knowing what to say in social situations that come up that you don’t learn about in books. For example, what do people typically say on the voicemail message, either the greeting or the message itself, when they call each other? It can be rather embarrassing not to know and generally with my foresight I only realize this fact after I hear the beep. That is if there were actually beeps.

I was out having drinks with a friend and this topic came up, yes, that probably makes me a boring drinking buddy but since bars are the center of social life here you end up in them a lot and I find myself running out of things to talk about. We have what seems like an insane number of phones in our house as a result of needing various Spainish and US land lines and mobile phones, all of which have voicemail. We have never received a voicemail message in spanish on our spanish numbers and we have never gotten voicemail when calling someone in Spain. Odd. Especially because we don’t pay for voicemail in Spain, it’s free with both our mobile and land line phones.

Why? In short, frugality. In Spain, like most of Europe, the phone system is a caller-pays system, and the rates vary depending on where you call and what type of phone you are calling. For example, when we call a mobile phone from our land line phone we pay a per-minute charge for the call. The person receiving the call however pays nothing. You only pay however if the call goes through; a busy signal or no answer is free. So if someone calls our house and lets the phone ring enough times for voicemail to pick up they get charged for the call; if they hang up first it’s free. All phones these days keep a missed call log, so rather than using voicemail people use the missed call log.

I still have no idea what to say on our outgoing voicemail or what I would say if I ever got to leave a message on someone else’s voicemail.