We Care About The Landline. Aw!

At least to me, one of the starkest ways technology has changed over my lifetime -- beyond the Internet, which has changed everything -- is the concept of the telephone.  I am old but I am not too old, and I remember wondering who was calling when the phone rang, and picking up the receiver and hearing the dial tone (quick aside: A school aide had to tell me what a dial tone was, and I think I was between the fourth and sixth grade), and being frustrated when you wanted to call someone but hearing a family member already on the line.  You had to remember a list of phone numbers -- and back then they usually were only seven digits -- and I made a point of writing them down.  I even remember using a rotary phone.  Man, those were the days.

And these days ... well, everything's different.  You are more likely to text than call.  Because of the advent of spam calling, you are more likely not to pick up the phone than to answer.  Everybody has a mobile phone, and it's not really a phone and more like a computer.  And if people lose their phones, and the phone numbers on it, they are screwed because no one remembers a phone number anymore.  That reminds me that I should update my day planner.  Anyway, there really isn't calling anymore so much as communicating.  The idea of calling has gone the way of the telephone switchboard operator.

Along with those changes, people are no longer tethered to their home phones, aka their landlines.  Some people have ditched them altogether.  We have not; I for one fear that modern technology will be felled by some act of God that makes us wish we had the primitive skills necessary to survive without our creature comforts.  (See: Pandemic.  Also see: Ice storms in the South.)  But we had been so inundated by spam callers that somehow have gotten our home phone that we have ignored all the times the phone rang.  What got me excited when I was young has in fact turned into an annoyance whenever I hear it now.  Soon, Father got fed up and automatically rerouted all calls to an answering machine.  Later, after he got fed up with that, he found a way to just silence the calls.  Really, Grandmother was the last person to use it with any regularity.

In the past, my parents have intimated that we could go without a landline.  I have resisted.  Not only do I think it would be smart to have it, just in case, but it's also something very personal with me.  I have lived in this house my entire life, so I have known this number my entire life.  I don't want to give it up just for sentimental reasons, even though that's a big part of it.  But it's also a part of my identity, and so if I ever did close out the account and give up the number, I would be giving up a part of myself.  So, as I grew up and my folks' thoughts about not having home phone service any more got more insistent, I decided I would pay the phone bill from now on.  At first we also had the phone company's DSL/Internet service, but once it got to be so slow as to be unusable, I switched to having Internet through someone else and thus have had only the phone service -- when I pared down my service just to landline I think the customer service representative on the other end of the line called it an "ankle bracelet" -- through this utility ever since.  I don't remember the last time I have used it.  Shoot, I remember more than a few times picking up the receiver and hearing this noise that I think comes from the coaxial.  But I don't have to use it to keep it around because it's me and I'm OK with that.

I've been waxing poetic and philosophical to get around to the news my parents told me when I got home from work yesterday.  The home phone isn't working.  I don't know how they found out, but when you call the landline, all you get is a busy signal.  Father went outside to check the wires, and he told me I need to call a utility technician to figure out what's going on.

I must admit that I have thought that this is a very, very crafty (and roundabout) tactic by my parents to finally convince me to disconnect the landline forever.  Yeah, there is a non-zero percent chance that Father found a way to mess up the phone line, have me call in a tech, have that tech determine that the problem is on our end of the line, and either Father would be unable to figure out what the problem is or refuse to spend any money to fix it, and thus it would make sense to just close down the account and surrender the phone number we have had since I was born.  But if I were less conspiratorial, I would be surprised and actually even a bit heartened to see that my parents want the home phone fixed because they want to have it around.  They can see the benefits of having the only landline number we have ever had as a backup way of communicating.  They may even be ... sentimental.