A bad day to quit

I was talking with an equally technophobic friend the other day. John and I were both trying to figure out why we have a land line phone at all. We both have cell phones. Our wives have cell phones. Our kids have cell phones. Off the top of my head I can’t come up with anyone I know who doesn’t have a cell phone. Although I have come up with a reason to keep the land line. I prefer it.

To me the cell phone, which was envisioned as a real world application of the Star Trek communicators, is a lot more like the walkie-talkies that I saw advertised on Major Mudd when I was a kid. Works a lot better in the ad than it does when you try to use it. The signal seems to break up whenever I try to have a conversation with it.

So, all things considered, if I have to have a conversation on a phone I’d rather have it via the old fashioned wired-to-the-rest-of-the-world land line. It worked for Alexander Graham Bell and it still works for me. Besides, the phone companies have spent gazillions of dollars upgrading the wiring to fiber-optics and such so I can get a crystal clear sound all the way up to the sneaker phone I have next to my desk.

That’s another problem right there isn’t it? Once upon a time the “phone company” was a megalithic monopoly which was bad. They were responsible for the call you received from its point of origin, say…Uncle Enos in Bangor, Maine, right to your ear as you sat by the little table the phone was on in the den in, say… Brookfield, Connecticut. We’re talking New England Telephone country here and they handled everything. They probably would have liked to edit Uncle Enos’ content, you know what happened to his language when he got excited, but they didn’t have quite that much influence.

On reflection, while New England Telephone was a monopoly, it was a good monopoly. Or at least it seemed that way. But somewhere in the metamorphoses into Nynex and Bell Atlantic and Verizon and, in Northern New England FairPoint, they became just another utility. Worse, now they are only responsible for getting the phone call to your house, after that you’re on your own.

Left to our own devices we generally favor inexpensive, often cheap, devices. Which is how the fiber optic cable winds up connected to a sneaker phone. Which needed to be replaced the other day.

Naturally, I had nothing to do with the process. I don’t know whether the cordless phone preceded the cell phone or the other way around. Either way the marriage of convenience and communication is still to me a marginally successful shotgun wedding. Oh, they’re married alright but they seem to fight all the time.

Okay, you’ve guessed that we have a new cordless phone. It’s charging for 15 to 20 hours right now getting itself ready to handle all of my incoming and outgoing calls. But am I ready to handle it? Probably not.

New England Telephone’s phones came with a dial. I now know that it was a godawfully slow device but at the time it seemed downright speedy. But what I miss is its simplicity. You dialed the number, it connected to the number, you talked, you hung up, done. Once a month you would get a bill that only a monopoly or a loan shark could present with a straight face. You grumbled that they ought to break up the bleepin’ phone company monopoly and you paid the bill because it was that or smoke signals.

My brand new cordless phone comes with a manual. 62 pages and, unusual these days, every one of them in English.

There’s how to read the display, how to use the four way function key, using the handset menus, how to figure out where to put the phone (I have a suggestion for this but they won’t like it), how to set up the phone book, how to create phone book entries, using the voicemail and that’s before I even get to the part where I can customize my phone. That’s right. After all that my phone isn’t really ready to work with me at an optimal level yet.

So what we’re got here is an opportunity for me to save all that enormous workload I used to have when I would get somebody’s number and write it down in a little black book by having the convenience of getting somebody’s number and programming it into my phone. And for that great effort saved I can spend some quality time with my brand spankin’ new 62 page manual figuring out how make a phone call. I think I picked the wrong lifetime to give up drinking.