National Inane Answering Message Day is a holiday that’s observed annually on January 30th and is a day that makes fun of the silly messages that were first used on answering machines and then later on digital voice mailboxes. We all know these types of messages. For example: “ You have just received my voicemail.

When you hear this beep please hang up and just text instead” or “Hi, please leave your name and number. I’m probably home but I’m just pretending I’m not to screen my calls. If I like you, I’ll call you back.” Those are the types of messages celebrated on this day, so let’s all have a little bit of fun with it for this holiday.

The History Of National Inane Answering Message Day

As is the case with so many holidays nowadays, this day was created by the founders of Wellcat. Thomas and Ruth Roy have created dozens of holidays through the years and they just happened to create this one in 2001.

According to this holiday, this is the day to change, replace, delete, or shorten ridiculous or annoying answering machine messages. While that might be the actual intent of this holiday, it appears that now people are observing it by making up their own inane answer messages.

Facts About Voice Mail

Anyone and everyone reading about this holiday today probably didn’t think that we would take the time to talk about voicemail, but I guess we surprised them. We couldn’t resist the opportunity to list some facts about voicemail to educate everyone on the subject. Let’s get to it and check out the following facts before moving on to how this holiday is observed.

• William Schergens invented the first answering machine in 1931 using phonographic cylinders.
• Benjamin Thornton developed a machine to record voice messages from the caller in 1935.
• The first commercially successful answering machine, the Electronic Secretary, was invented in 1949 by Joseph Zimmerman and George W. Danner.

Observing National Inane Answering Message Day

Everyone can observe this holiday. They can do so by changing the answering message on their digital mailboxes to a more respectable message, to a new message, or even to a silly message. There are no rules to how this holiday should be celebrated.

Everyone who is celebrating can encourage other people to celebrate it, however, by spreading it across the Internet using the hashtag #NationalInaneAnsweringMessageDay on social media.