There are subtle things about any house. Like its smell. You get used to your own house smell, but other people notice it. It's basement fust, or mold puppies, or fossil baseboard grunge, or termite farts, or sheetrock exhalations, or something. I know my house smells because I sometimes detect it when I come in after it's been shut up for a while, but pretty soon the brain determines it's Familiar and Non-Threatening and filters it out and that's that. I don't know what my house smells like. I only know it's not cleaning products.Now there's something different about our house. It's subtle too. You have to be in here for a while to notice. About an hour would do it.
Yes. It's the sound of the goddamn phone not ringing.
Pulled the little stinker's umbilical right out of the wall, I did. All of a sudden, just like that. We've been wondering whether or not to ditch the landline for a while. Nobody ever calls us on it who doesn't know another way to reach us. But it's a giant gaping portal for the undesirable commercial world.
Some of the same people have been calling at least once a day with the same routine for years. Years. Same. People. Same. Routine. Daily. Middle of the night, sometimes.
I guess there are reasons to keep a landline. One: the sound quality is better. This is true, but I don't need to hear Jason calling from Windows all that clearly--it's still the accent that throws me. Two: if you call 9-1-1 on a landline, the 9-1-1 folks have a better idea where you are. They can't home in on the cell phones quite as well.
Great. But if I've fallen and I can't get up, and I'm more than three feet from my landline, they're not getting any call from me.
Three: Something something something.
Here's the main reason we still pay for the landline. Our number is cool. It sounds like we picked it out ourselves. It's so cool, it's just one number off from a medical clinic. A lot of people who misdial the clinic are old. We used to try to give them the proper number, but too many of them couldn't understand why we answered the phone if it was the wrong number. Now we just listen and give medical advice.
We got this number in 1978 when we moved in. Your range was only as long as your cord. Mostly people had push-button phones by then. That's a good thing because there are two zeroes in our number--just like my childhood number--and people hated that. It's an easy one to remember, but if you're in a hurry, your finger might sail out of the rotary dial before you get it all the way around and you have to start over. Now, of course, nobody has to remember any phone numbers. Theoretically that should free up some brain space but it doesn't. "Build Me Up Buttercup" will just pour into the vacuum and stay there on a loop.Oh hell, I'll tell you how cool it is. Privacy be damned. It's 282-4900. Right? Go ahead and call. It won't ring on my end.
I don't need no Medicare. I'll just call my own number. They give great medical advice.
Posts
I gave up my landline when I moved here seven years ago, I don't miss it at all. "People" still try calling my mobile but I don't answer any numbers I don't recognise and family and friends all know to send me a text message instead.
ReplyDeleteI've got the same plan. Now if I can make myself send a misspelled and unpunctuated text, I'll save lots of time.
DeleteI still have a land line because our alarm system needs it. I almost never answer it, as it's not even in our name, so nobody we know would call us on it anyway. (Too cheap to pay for an unlisted number, I asked them if I could just have it listed under a fake name. Sure, they said. So if anyone calls and asks me if I am Mrs. "Manderly" I know that I can play with their minds without repercussions.)
ReplyDeleteI still get all those annoying robocalls on my cell phone, though. Plus the "Windows" guys with the heavy Indian accents. I just yell at them for being scammers, and -oh- how proud their mothers must be! Then there's the "IRS" who are going to arrest me at any moment. I call back the number and yell at them, too: "Come and GET me, you mother******* scammer! Bwa-ha-ha!"
Hey, you reminded me. I still have an alarm system. Or I might still have an alarm system. I have motion detectors and a keypad on my walls, but I haven't paid a bill since about 1995. Now I don't know what will happen if I pull that stuff out of my walls. Will it be noisy? Will my house burn down?
DeleteI suppose you're going to make me look up the area code, aren't you? What if I need medical advice or other critical wisdom? You are only thinking of yourself! What about MY needs?
ReplyDeleteOtoh, cell phones don't work here so I have to have a land line, but I also have fiber optic interwebs and they tell me I can use that for my phone. Do they still know where to come and pick up my carcass if I croak?
503, darling, call anytime. I know exactly what's wrong with you.
DeleteA dumb reason not to ditch the landline, and the very same one we use. We've had our cool number 49 years. Get the same phone calls you do. Except for those seeking medical advice.
ReplyDeleteWe used to have a phone number that was the same as a local movie theater... except the last two digits were transposed. We were always getting calls asking when the next show started. "When can you get here?" I would ask. When "Jaws" was playing there, our phone was ringing off the hook.
DeleteRemember when you'd move into a new place and you had to wait for Ma Bell to give you a new number? And how disappointing it was if it was crummy?
DeleteWe still have a landline but we have a caller ID phone and it makes all the difference. We just don't answer if we don't recognize the number. Hopefully no long-lost relatives want to find us.
ReplyDeleteBut then we don't have those fancy phones, so we need SOMEthing.
You know what? Even the fancy phones aren't that fancy if you don't know how to use them. I'm told.
DeleteI find two old bean cans, connected with a length of string still work pretty well.As long as the friend you want to talk to is on the other end. Just like proper phone, really and at least the Mumbai tele-marketing squad can't call...
ReplyDeleteThat also gets you a nice distance from your friend, if you have personal space issues.
DeleteWe bundled our landline service with our TV cable and internet. So when someone calls on the landline, the number (and sometimes name) shows up on the TV screen. Sure saves a lot of interruptions. Oh golly, we were holding on to the landline because it never goes out -- it was a simple electromechanical thing. But now that our landline is electronic, and also dependent on cable & internet, it could fail us. And then I'd just lie on the floor dying. In a thunderstorm.
ReplyDeleteIt's good to go out with a bang.
DeleteI/we have one still. Mostly because my recalcitrant hands find it easier. It rarely rings. Which is fine by me.
ReplyDeleteI thought I'd have to ditch the landline but just having it, but having it unplugged, is even more satisfying. It's like I'm giving it a time-out of several years.
DeleteI don't have a cell phone. My landline rarely rings. If it does, it's family, friends or a woman offering me something in a language that might be Chinese.
ReplyDeleteTake her up on it, and get back to us.
DeleteHey there
ReplyDeleteDo you remember your first phone number? Did it start with letters, an abbreviation of a word? Like EVergreen 5503? Later evolving into 382-5503, which a few years later changed to include area codes. I loved as a kid (4-5th grader) to just pick up the phone gently and listen in to the neighborhooder or whomever was on the party line. I think we had two, but in '53 may have been more.
I haven't had a land line in over 10 years. If you call my number and I don't answer, a voice tells you to either email me, or send a text. Email is better, you have a greater chance I'll respond. Text is problematic. Voice mails, as I tell them, I don't even listen to.
I love being old and erratic. My kids say I've always been erratic, bit what do they know?
ULysses2-8350 1st grade
Delete5030 Kaspar St., Corpus Christi TX
don't think they had zip codes then
Of course! JAckson 2-0056. Toldja it had two zeroes. We had a party line but the other family wasn't on it very often. Neither were we, I guess. And definitely no zip codes: Arlington 7, Virginia.
DeleteWe used to have a cool number as well. Then, the phone company contacted us and said someone else wanted the number because it was so cool, and we just must not have been appreciating it enough. They decided someone else should have it. A business. They then gave us a very uncool number. If we'd been smart, we should have made them pay us, but no--we weren't even that cool.
ReplyDeleteWe dumped the landline years ago. The worst thing is that we still have that big place for the phone on the wall....looks decidedly not cool.
Hang a picture there, perhaps a picture of an old fashioned dial phone with ear piece like you see in really old black and white movies.
DeletepFT! Not a dial phone, one of those ones where you turned the handle and asked the operator to please connect you to...
DeleteOr at least one where you grab the phone off the hook and bang on the cradle repeatedly!
DeleteStill have land line and lots of folks call me thinking I am some great philanthropist. I don't answer, but it is nice to be wanted.
ReplyDeleteNo, it's not.
DeleteI ditched my landline years ago. How the telemarketers dealt with their loss, I don't know. Now it's the cell. I carry it in case I have to call 911, but I've told all my friends I won't answer it, and the telemarketers can go hang. Text messages, I do answer. Unless they're from the phone company, wishing me another happy birthday. I don't need that sort of reminder!
ReplyDeleteIt's kind of interesting that now you don't have to remember your friends' phone numbers, but you DO have to remember which way they will answer a communication--phone, text, email, voicemail...because most of us have preferences.
DeleteWhen you give up your land line, you do not have to give up the phone number. Just have it "ported" over to your cell phone to replace its number. We still have a land line that was connected 17 years ago to the last pair of copper wires on the 27 pair cable originally put in back in the mid-1960s for the Titan missile silo just down the road from us. Goes out several times a year when the copper thieves go out into the desert and steal the wire or the woodpeckers peck holes in the cable.
ReplyDeleteI like things that fail for real physical reasons that you can understand. Woodpeckers, for instance. I remember watching a TV forty years ago--a Super Bowl party, I think--and it started to get what we called "snow," where the screen just sort of gets dimmer and dimmer. And the TV owner said it was "snow" and left the house. To clear the snow off the dish.
DeleteI got to thinking, what makes 4900 a cool number? It is cool, I agree, but why should we think so? Are zeroes just inherently sexier than other digits? That reminded me of another cool number, which my dear old Dad told me about. We were having dinner in a restaurant, and when the bill came, the total was 137. "137!" said Dad. "One of the most fascinating numbers in all of physics!" This caused a bit of silence at the table, until some one asked him, "Why is that, Pop?" and in response he grinned and told us, "NOBODY KNOWS!"
ReplyDeleteIt turns out that 137 is a very special number after all. It has to do with quantum mechanics, relativity, and electromagnetism, and the fact that a famous physicist died in a hospital room numbered 137.But the thing is, as much as 137 is pretty much indispensable and mysterious and sexy and cool and potentially a key to a Grand Unified Theory, (if you're a physicist, anyway), nobody knows WHY the magic is in 137, vs. any other number. Like 4900.
http://www.feynman.com/science/the-mysterious-137/
I miss my Dad, and love your blog. Somehow it's all connected.
Don't think even for a minute I'm not going to look THAT up!
ReplyDelete