SerpApi.Org
There was a death in our household last week. Our landline went to the big switchboard in the sky.
We had moved to a new house. It wasn’t very far away. Just about a half-mile down the road and still in the same neighborhood.
I called up Ma Bell at the venerable American Telephone and Telegraph company (AT&T) and meekly asked to have my service transferred to the new address. Well, guess what Ma said? She said I would be disconnected and dropped the call. That didn’t strike a telephone cord with me, to say the least. I had half a mind to take a switchboard to her.
I was so angry, I wanted to ring Ma’s bell, because I didn’t like her dial tone. I wanted to know what her hang-up was. What was the reason for the disconnect?
Well, I wasn’t going to let her off the switchhook so easily. In my telephone book, that was going too far. I guess that meant it was the end of the landline for my phone service. Alexander Graham Bell (Pa Bell) would be rolling over in his telephone booth if he saw this.
Well, like most things, this comes down to money. The traditional old copper lines are expensive to maintain, and the copper is pretty valuable, too. Just ask any metal thief. The upside of a landline is that you have phone service during a power outage since it provides its own energy and runs on a separate line from the power company. That way, you can still call the power company to tell them your electricity is out.
However, in the old days, when your phone line went dead, but you had electricity, you could still use one of your appliances, like a toaster, but you couldn’t notify the phone company.
If the toaster caught fire, your phone was dead, and you couldn’t call the fire department, you were toast.
The alternative to a landline is what they call a “voice over Internet protocol” or VoIP. It works fine as long as your Internet is up and running (provided you have Internet service to begin with). If your teenager is hogging bandwidth with his video game or streaming YouTube channels, you won’t be able to make a phone call at all. Sometimes it will default to cell towers to get your call through to the pizza parlor. However, if you’re a soybean, wheat, or corn farmer and cell service is spotty in the pasture, good luck with that. And if you’re pinned under the tractor, your cell signal is weak or non-existent, and you haven’t trained your dog Lassie how to call for help from a land line, you might as well phone it in and succumb to your fate.
And like landlines, phone books have become scarcer and thinner. I remember we kept years of old phone books in the basement. They accumulated in the corner somewhere, gathering dust next to the old editions of the newspaper. I guess we found it hard to part with them, given the fact that we might need to look up an old number that later became unlisted. I wonder how many forests have been saved since the demise of the phone book.
And telephone books were useful for more than finding someone’s number. They propped open doors, were used by small kids as booster seats, and in a real pinch, they could stop a bullet or a knife attack from an intruder.
And finally, if you’re wistful for the past, there is still a group devoted to the old, black desk telephones with the old dial.
Just join the local chapter of the rotary club.
Joe Crawford is an award-winning columnist and longtime Alton resident who frequently writes columns for The Telegraph. He can be contacted at [email protected]
