Strange Voicemail

Posted May 18, 2012, 12:15 p.m.

So, I was out of the office for a couple of days with a bad cold. When I got back in this morning, I had a voicemail on my office phone—a fairly rare occurrence, since phones are now about fifth in the office order of communication priority (after email, IM, face-to-face, and carrier pigeon). Usually when I get voicemails at work, they are nothing but a couple seconds of silence, or a recorded spiel for some product I don’t want.

Today, however, I got a mostly-unintelligible message from somebody who identified himself as ‘Christopher Pasquale.’ He called from a California area code at 2:58am ET on Thursday, and slurred something about how “I don’t know what to do with these crazy white people,” and that he didn’t know “where you are in DC, or Arlington, or Langley.”

Anyway . . . here’s the recording (MP3 link). Maybe you can make more sense of it than I did. Note that I have redacted the phone number by changing area code to 555; the original recording contained the actual area code. This guy seems to have enough problems without a bunch of Off on a Tangent readers calling him. That’s the only edit I made, other than snipping out some silence from our voicemail system.

Scott Bradford has been putting his opinions on his website since 1995—before most people knew what a website was. He has been a professional web developer in the public- and private-sector for over twenty years. He is an independent constitutional conservative who believes in human rights and limited government, and a Catholic Christian whose beliefs are summarized in the Nicene Creed. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. He loves Pink Floyd and can play the bass guitar . . . sort-of. He’s a husband, pet lover, amateur radio operator, and classic AMC/Jeep enthusiast.

Quotes

Chance is always powerful. Let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish.

One man may prefer a routine job with much time off for basking in the sun to a more exacting job paying a higher salary; another man may prefer the opposite. If both were paid equally in money, their incomes in a more fundamental sense would be unequal.

There are three important things to know about human beings. . . . Humans use pattern recognition to understand their world. Humans are very bad at pattern recognition. And they don’t know it.

Don’t be yourself, be someone a little nicer.

There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I think there is always a need in any struggle for sensationalists. They get the headlines, they get the ear of the public, they take the race horse chances.

The church, a community that authoritatively teaches and disciples its members, cannot withstand a revolution in which each member becomes, in effect, his own pope.

A great memory does not make a philosopher, any more than a dictionary can be called grammar.

Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?

The only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.

Force without wisdom falls of its own weight.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Brooks’s Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the unlimited authority of the majority, which may at some future time urge the minorities to desperation, and oblige them to have recourse to physical force.

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a deal longer.

The surface of American society is, if I may use the expression, covered with a layer of democracy, from beneath which the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep.

You can observe a lot by watching.