Recent data confirms that people rarely talk on the phone these days. About 80% of cell phone calls go unanswered. Seeing that number, you might assume we’re all constantly leaving one another voicemails.

Not so. Only about 20% of those unanswered calls result in a voicemail, and as most of us know, many of those are spam. In most personal situations, people are far more likely to send a text than leave a voicemail. And yet, those of us who grew up with landlines—Millennials and Gen Xers in particular—often find it hard to break the habits that were ingrained in us as children.

Creator showcases her pitch-perfect voicemail skills

In the days before automatic caller ID or digital call-back buttons (remember *69?), leaving a detailed voicemail was crucial if you wanted someone to get back in touch with you.

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when someone might not even know they’d missed a call, let alone who it was from. As a result, Millennials and Gen Xers were taught proper phone etiquette from a young age. There were rules. If you answered the phone and someone asked for you, the correct response was, “This is he.”

If you were a kid and someone asked to speak to one of your parents, you were never, under any circumstances, allowed to say, “They’re not home.”

And we all followed a very particular script when leaving messages.

Creator, mom, and self-proclaimed “geriatric Millennial” Chrissy Allen demonstrated it in a recent Instagram........

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