Science & Tech Quote by Steven Wright

Steven Wright’s joke works like a perfectly timed glitch in the machinery of modern convenience: the answering machine, designed to make you reachable, is repurposed to make you officially unavailable. By putting it in his car and having it announce “I’m home now,” he weaponizes the polite lie at the heart of phone etiquette. The technology is supposed to collapse distance; Wright uses it to multiply it, creating a little pocket dimension where location and obligation no longer line up.

The intent isn’t just absurdity for its own sake. It’s a deadpan critique of how “availability” became a social mandate long before smartphones finished the job. The message mimics the canned friendliness of automated systems while smuggling in a refusal: you can leave your request, but you don’t get real-time access to me. The last clause, “I’ll call when I’m out,” flips the normal promise (I’ll call when I’m free) into something faintly perverse. He’ll return your call when he’s away from home, as if intimacy and responsiveness require displacement.

Subtextually, it’s about boundaries in a culture that treats communication as a faucet you should keep running. Wright’s persona - laconic, slightly alienated, amused by the logic of everyday life - makes the line land as both confession and protest. Context matters: coming out of an era of answering machines and landlines, the bit anticipates our current reality, where presence is constantly negotiated, curated, and faked. The joke isn’t predicting the future so much as revealing the scam already built into “reachability.”