Esther McCarthy: The wonder of WhatsApp voice notes

Yes, I am that infuriating person that starts off by saying it would be faster to send a voice note because I’m too busy/tired/lazy to text and sends a convoluted one-sided voice note in reply to your message that really only required a yes or no answer.

Ah yeah, I’ll happily suck your soul out through your phone for four minutes instead of tapping out a response that would take less than four seconds.

I bloody LOVE voice notes though. Sending and receiving. They are the perfect comms for my age group.

We are normally taxiing our little darlings around to GAA, and tennis, and swimming, and gymnastics, and origami- Lego-Stem- club or whatever baloney camp we’ve convinced our kids would be great craic so we can pawn them off for a few hours during the summer.

So there you are sitting in traffic, the phone in the little holder on the dash, Google maps at the ready in case your scattered brain decides to forget how to get to the pitch in the Backarse Of Nowhereville, and it’s beckoning you, like your own little microphone, just begging you to record something.

What’s the harm in having a little natter/onesided heart-to-heart/verbal warning to whoever’s at home to have the dinner ready?

Well, it depends on the recipient. Every time I send my aunt one, she immediately tries to ring me. NO! Are you insane? I don’t want to actually TALK to you. That’s the beauty of the voice note. 

Each party can happily yap away, without the fear of the other interrupting with news of their own. Imagine!

I’m lucky, many of my voice note senders are hilarious — especially when they don’t have to contend with me butting in half way through their stories. When people ramble, that’s when the gold comes.

Mostly.

I have an older relative I made the mistake of showing them how voice notes work. This fella only recently moved from a Nokia Blockia, he wouldn’t be tech savvy, like, but by jay, he’s a whizz at the old voice notes.

He’ll ráiméis away until he runs out of breath (he never runs out of things to say) or has to go to the toilet or he’s seen a dog with a puffy tail to chase. 

But, with the magic of voice notes, I can put him on double speed and fly through it. And he can do the same to me. We both didn’t lick the loquaciousness off a stone, to be fair.

I send voice notes to one pal every time I go to yoga because I pass her house and think of her. “Hi! I just passed your house. How’s it going? We must meet up for coffee soon. Guess what happened today…” 

Then she’ll send me one back and I’ll have something to listen to on the way home. Tune in next week, same bat time, same bat channel. It’s become a comforting part of my routine.

I have one friend, who is lovely and sweet and wouldn’t dream of hurting anyone’s feelings, (I know — why is she hanging out with me?) she pretends her phone is broken in a very specific way that means voice notes don’t work. It doesn’t stop me, I still send them.

Haha! I love imagining her look of terror when one pings in. She is the terrified neighbour Elizabeth to my Hyacinth Bucket.

But when they’re done right, there’s nothing like a good monologue.

They’re nothing new of course, theatre in ancient Rome featured them extensively, Victorian poet Robert Browning was celebrated for his dramatic monologues, and eminent storytellers from Shakespeare to Spielberg have used them to fair effect. 

Some of the most brilliant films of our time just wouldn’t be the same without a character’s chance to deliver a masterful monologue — it can nudge a movie into legend. 

Think of Liam Neeson in Taken. “I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.” (I imagine that lovely friend of mine mutters it every time she sees the dreaded voice note pop in.)

Neeson’s delivery catapulted it to a cultural milestone — and one of the most mocked and memed.

Other great monologues that come to mind; Darth Vader’s big reveal, anything Homer Simpson uttered up to season 11, and what about Robert Shaw’s incredible performance as Quint in The Indianapolis Speech Scene in Jaws? “Lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes...” It still gives me chills.

The only thing I don’t like about the WhatsApp voice note monologue maker is the way it starts out loud when you press the play button, then goes quiet and pauses itself on the way up to your ear. So you look like you’re doing the robot dance trying to listen.

A small price to pay to listen to a mini podcast about the jerk who took my carpark space though, right?

I’ll go away now so, byebyebyebyebuhbyebyebyeBYEEEEE.