Remember the landline? Here’s what happened when the old phone went radio silent
I might live in the last household on Earth to still claim an active landline. Call me Wilma Flintstone, but several personal and professional reasons have kept my home tethered to this phonasaurus relic, mostly relating to the need for an iPhone back-up should emergency calls come in.
Bonus: the option to stash my addictive cell phone at the bottom of laundry baskets, muffled away in silence for blocks of time, has given me a sense of at-home freedom. Same for my husband. We’ve always known that people who might need us urgently can call our 1993 selves, and we will answer.
Don’t trust the clouds! Beware of the ether! Attach that tin can to a string and live free!
We’ve enjoyed this solid, reliable peace-of-mind landline thing until it recently blanked out on us. I couldn’t believe it. For the first time ever, it suddenly stopped working. Did a squirrel chew on some house wires? Maybe the last Wichita lineman quit?
I felt like a ghost with a big hair perm and shoulder pads testing each extension, hoping it was a silly glitch. I convinced myself maybe one receiver shorted out from a recent water splash when I left it too close to the sink. We have a cordless landline set we purchased maybe a decade ago, but for reasons I can’t explain we have always kept one of those previous century phones with the long curly cord. A back-up to our back-up system. It’s the kind that plugs directly into the wall. A real museum piece.
I used that old push button hunk of “sleek” plastic to test all the phone jacks in the house. That tiny “clickity” clip that plugs into the little square holes stirred some dust and aural memories from the Johnny Carson era, but not the comfort of a dial tone.
And let me tell you, kids, a dial tone sounds like a steady mid-distant train horn without the Doppler effect. It’s a sorrowful hum, a liminal space between “I’m connected to a working device…the possibility to converse with another human is in my hands!” and, “I’ve just been hung up on!”
The line was definitely dead. I had no recourse but to call the phone folks, which is a euphemism for wasting hours on hold. (You can’t spell futility without utility.) For too long I tolerated the repeated announcement that interrupts the tinny hold music, the disembodied voice suggesting I troubleshoot online. Nope. I’m the kind of person who prefers to problem-solve with real people. I avoid website “chat” robots to fix my human annoyances.
When I finally got a hold of a live body in the customer service department, I was told the technician would arrive at my house the next day between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. What? A 12-hour commitment. That’s not an appointment window, but an appointment barn door. And perhaps a passive-aggressive way to nudge me to upgrade to some other communications bundle. I had no choice but to block out a whole day.
But get this. The evening before my low-tech repair vigil, I took a walk through the neighborhood. On a main intersection, I stumbled upon a messy “road improvement” construction site. There were deep holes blocked off by orange mesh fences. I looked down one, and what did I see? Many exposed cables and wires likely roughed up.
Aha! Maybe I didn’t short circuit my receiver that one time. Maybe our old equipment was not to blame. I took a picture as potential evidence in case my broken connection turned out to be a head-scratcher or wallet-gouger.
The next day, as I waited too long for the repairman to show up, I contemplated just going pure cell phone and figuring out urgent call workarounds. But by the fifth hour, my dead landline jumped to life with that old familiar ring. It was the repair guy. Turns out he found a cut line down the road, somewhere in one of those deep holes.
Dial M for mystery solved.
Reach Denise Snodell at stripmalltree@gmail.com.
