San Francisco, 1981: It was actually because of Lonesome Cowboy Tim.

Lonesome Cowboy Tim was the alternate persona of a disk jockey who’d emigrated from Houston to San Francisco, back back in the days of answering machines, before all this voicemail foolishness.

There was a phone number, and when you called it was answered by Lonesome Cowboy Tim, saying “Howdy, Buckaroos!” and then he’d recount some adventure that he and the prairie critters had experienced recently.

Since it was a single line on an answering machine, after some weeks you’d find the line always busy. Then the number would be changed, and you’d have to somehow find it again. This was a challenge, because it was purely word of mouth, yet somehow we always found Lonesome Cowboy Tim.

When Network started up the Third Ear Telepathic Answering Service, we’d not intended to have a phone number at all, since the answering service was telepathic, but the phonebook rep insisted we had to list a phone number.

So I set up an answering machine with Ruru the Guru. Here’s what it said …

“Hello! And thank you for calling Third Ear Telepathic Answering Service. I am your host and operator, Ruru the Guru, speaking to you direct from our Himalaya Hideaway.

“You know, many people have telepathed in recently, asking me, ‘Ruru, just how does one leave a message for Third Ear Telepathic Answering Service?’

“Well, it’s very simple. It’s just like using a telephone. You just lift your little mental receiver, and you listen for your mental dial-tone …

“Awwooo-ooo-ooo-ooo!

“Then you just mentally dial my number — 426 299737 19937 49972 29973 299 503 — and then I’ll answer, any time, any place. Then you just leave your a mental message for anybody, whether you know them or not, and I’ll deliver it right inside their head, immediately!

“Just remember: it’s mental.”

San Francisco, 1981: Every year, to the office of Network Answering Service in the big corner flat on the second story above Geary Boulevard, came Mark Bell, the Pacific Bell Directory salesman. And yes, his name really was Mark Bell.

This was back before Pacific Bell splintered into forty or fifty companies so as to serve you better and save you so much money which is why your phone bill is so much lower these days. This was back before Pacific Bell changed personnel every fifteen minutes. In fact, the same guy came every year. Mark Bell.

He was accustomed to my odd phone book listings.

The first year I opened the answering service, 1976, I didn’t know which name would work the best, so I put five different business names under answering bureaus, to see which one people would call.

Getting the names had been easy. I’d hauled a pony keg of beer up the stairs to my third-floor studio apartment, invited Richard W. and Phil Groves and about thirty other people, and that evening we drank beer and thought up names for answering services. A lot of these names were real stupid.

But I’d settled on five — A Budget Answering Service, Network Answering Service, Sundial, Western Eclectic, and Xanadu Answering Service. As it turned out, people called “A Budget” the most, probably because it came first in the list, but that sounded too cheap so we mainly used the Network Answering Service name.

We did put up posters around town picturing a duck and saying A Budget Answering Service, with little yellow take-one cards. Little yellow ducky cards continued to surface for many years after the posters. People would call to sign up. We’d ask them how they heard of us. “I’ve got this little yellow card with a duck,” they’d say.

After the first year, in the yellow pages we dropped the names except A Budget and Network, but this year I had a new idea, so I gave Mark Bell an additional name.

“It should say Third Ear Telepathic Answering Service,” I told Mark, “and with an extra line that says: We use no phones.”

Mark Bell didn’t even blink; he just filled out the form. “And what phone number do you want to list?” he asked.

“None,” I said, “It won’t have a phone number at all.”

He stopped, raised his head to stare. “I can’t do that,” he said. “It’s got to have a phone number.”

“Why?” I demanded.

“Because it’s a phone book!”

Hmmm. He had me there. That was a stumper. So I fetched from our records an unused number, and gave it to him.

In September, the phone book came out, and there under Answering Bureaus was Third Ear Telepathic Answering Service. We use no phones. 221-3333.

On that line, I installed a message-only answering machine, and every few weeks I’d change the recording. The phone was apparently answered by Ruru the Guru, who lived in a Himalaya Hideaway, and from the astral plane provided telepathic answering service as a free public service for anybody who wished to send or receive a telepathic message.

We don’t have any real statistics on how much the telepathic answering service was actually used. I mean, just given all the daily work, it’s just so hard to keep accurate statistics, you know?