Vera Verba

Although my name is Sean Hastings, and I am an Author, not a talk radio host, I regularly receive voice mail messages intended for Sean Hannity.

[Feel free to Skip to the bottom for the link to the audio files - but be sure to leave a comment with a link to your favorite message!]

Why this happens probably requires a little bit of explanation.

I have the phone number 1-800-WHY-SEAN which I acquired 15 years ago by flirting on the phone with the lady who was setting up my 800 service for a small business venture I was pursuing. She liked my jokes so much she decided to try to find me a really cool 800 number, rather than just giving me one “off the rack.”

That particular business only paid my bills for a couple years, but when it finally died, I kept the 800 number because I liked it so much.

A few years latter, someone left me several messages about buying the 800 number, but I never returned the calls. At the time I thought nothing of it, but then a while after that I began to get peculiar wrong numbers. Especially peculiar because my name is in fact Sean, so the messages seemed to be for me.

They would say things like,

“Sean, you are a great American, and I just wanted you to know that I agree with everything that you say.”

“Well that’s nice,” I would think to myself, “but who the hell was that?”

Other times these messages would be less flattering, and more just creepy right wing ranting like,

“Sean, I disagree with you when you say that gays should not be allowed into the military - I  think they should all be forced to join the military and sent on suicide missions!”

And since I was wearing my hair long back then and even had an earring, I found myself a little scared that whomever this was calling me had my number and seemingly knew my name…

But eventually I heard a couple messages along the lines of,

“Is this the Sean Hannity Show? Do I have the right number?”

And I realized what was happening. I didn’t even know who Sean Hannity was at the time, but I gathered that I was getting wrong numbers for some other “Sean” who was apparently some sort of talk radio DJ.

Latter I remembered that someone had wanted to buy the 800-WHY-SEAN number, and I assumed that they had settled on one that was close to it (off by only one digit it turns out) when I had failed to get back to them. You see, my 800-WHY-SEAN number is 800-949-7326, and it turns out that the call-in number for Sean Hannity’s radio talk show is 800-941-7326.

During the 2004 election year, I started to get more calls, so in August of that year I changed my voice mail message to say something like “Sean can’t take your calls right now, but he’d like to here what’s on your mind. You release the rights for anyone to publish or broadcast any message you leave here…”

At the time I thought that I might get around to doing something interesting with the messages. [I even tried to contact Al Franken, because I thought he might have an amusing idea, but he never got back to me.] But after the election, the messages came fewer and farther between and I stopped thinking about it, although I would still occasionally get into some trouble with my wife when a sexy voiced women would leave a message saying something like,

“Sean, you are a great American, and I have been a bad bad girl. I want to you to put me over your knee and spank me, then I want you to pull down my panties and…”

[Who knew that being a conservative pundit could get you laid?]

But now it is election season once again, and the messages have once again started pouring in. So I am asking you, dear reader, to help me out here with your suggestions. What should I do with these messages?

Should I make youtube videos where I field the calls and answer them as best I can?

Should I publish them all in a book?

Some of these people even leave their telephone numbers - should I call them back? Do you want to?

Below is a link to a directory of audio files for all the odd calls I have received ever since I included that disclaimer indicating that the voice messages would be published. I am making them available for humorous purposes, but also to hopefully inspire someone to come up with a really good idea about what I should do with them.

They are in order by date - so start at the end for the most currently politically relevant material:

http://www.veraverba.com/Hannity/

Please let me know which ones are your favorites, and how you think I should respond to them if I ever find the time to do so.