"You have no messages," stated the mechanical voice coming out of our home answering machine.

While that was not unusual for us, the big "3" showing the number of old messages was indeed unique.

"Honey, someone was playing around with the answering machine," I said scratching my head. Most days, the machine shows anywhere from 10 to 15 messages that are from this past summer, messages like "Hey guys, we're heading to the pool if you want to join us," or my personal favorite, "We have extra tickets to the Pirates game tomorrow. Let me know if you want them." I still don't want those, by the way.

My wife and I have a different approach to the answering machine issue.

Apparently, I have a "delete" problem, as my pointy finger is itchy to pull the trigger and press the delete button before a message is even played the entire way through. This same problem persists with my e-mail, so I apologize to any of you in advance if your e-mails go unreturned.

My wife, on the other hand, has a problem remembering to call someone back. As a result, she will often leave old, stale, worn-out, meaningless messages on the machine until she either A) Gets a new answering system or B) The caller calls back 46 times.

So it was perplexing this past weekend to see that we only had three old messages instead of a dozen.

"No. I took care of them and cleaned out the box," she said, smiling like a woman who had caught her husband with his hand in the cookie jar.

Why, I wondered. The last check revealed 14 old messages; messages that beckoned someone like me to play them repeatedly, asking my wife to please call so and so back since they had a great recipe for Shepherd's Pie or a new twist on a fruit salad.

Then I discovered my wife's newest found gadget, a handy dandy notebook that would allow us to listen to the message, write down the caller's name and number and then move onto the next message. Once you listed to each caller you could delete all of the messages.

Brilliant!

Now, we have a backup system for my itchy delete finger, as well as written proof that so-and-so called on a certain date, asking my wife to please respond quickly or else the tickets will be gone.

But wait a minute. Isn't this a little redundant? After all, the expensive answering machine we have records all of those nice messages and stores them inside the guts of our phone so that we don't need to blow through notepad paper the way Homer Simpson blows through doughnuts.

I have images of notepads with my horrible writing, which looks more like Egyptian hieroglyphics, stacked up to the ceiling in our computer room, complete with messages from years ago.

This is not a good plan.

So for a moment, my finger hovers above the delete key while I play the three remaining messages. After confirming that all three are, in fact, written on our little notepad, I hesitantly push the button, thus erasing them for eternity.

I think as a backup plan I will e-mail my wife all three messages so there's a second copy.

Christian Ola, a community columnist for the Butler Eagle, resides in Mars with his wife, son and daughter and can be reached at christianolac@aol.com.