My landline is my best friend
By Mark Mogensen, bPlus Editor
Well Heather, self-named Digital Diva of the New Millennium, it seems you’ve forgotten your roots.
After spending your teen years talking for hours on that cute, pink Slimline to your girlfriends while lying on your bed in your robin’s egg pedal-pushers, with your Peggy Lee hairdo, filing your nails and gossiping about boys, you’re going to give up your precious landline, are you?
The same phone on which you sang “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face” to your first boyfriend?
The same landline your husband grabbed to call the ambulance to take you to the hospital to deliver all of your 11 children!?! You’re giving up THAT LANDLINE?!?
Familiar with the word fickle?
OK, forget the emotional and sentimental arguments for keeping your landline for a moment. What about the historic argument? What about Alexander Graham Bell? If Bell knew everyone was going to go to cell phones he might not have bothered to invent the landline. He might have gone directly to the SlapChop.
In fact, Heather, there are zillions of high quality and safe (heh, heh, heh) reasons to keep your landline. Here are just 10:
10. Cost: While you and your cell mates — no, darlin’, not your friends at the Maine State Prison — are paying tens of tens of dollars for text messages and data plans and downloads and apps, I pay one low price of $19 a month and can make UNLIMITED calls to my homies in Mechanic Falls, Lisbon and other Maine happenin’ locales. That’s thanks to my peeps at Fairpoint. And I pay only $2.90 — that’s two Washingtons and ninety centavos — for every 100 minutes of long distance! Let’s see you find a cell phone plan with that feature. Pioneer Tel.Co., you rock!
9. Can you say P-O-W-E-R O-U-T-A-G-E? What will you do when you can’t charge your phone Heather? And what about a solar flare? You’re out! When Korean missiles blast your communications satellite out of the sky you’ll be holding the iPhone Fried Edition. When Ice Storm II comes, I’ll be sittin’ pretty. Power outages and signal problems don’t affect my landline. You? Where will you be, Mrs. Frozen Tears???
8. Can’t lose it, can’t drop it in my ice fishing hole. And I don’t have to spend $60 to $100 a year for cell phone insurance and then spend another $100 for the deductible. Does that sound like a deal to you Heather Emptywallet?
7. Mother has one. Did you know that 19 out of 20 people over 65 are keeping their landlines. (Oops, maybe that’s an argument for your side. Just kidding Mom!)
6. Cord twirling. Who doesn’t find it therapeutic to wind the cord around their finger? Wind, unwind. Wind, unwind. Ahhh . . .
5. It makes me feel popular. The phone is constantly ringing at dinner time with cool sales offers. And when election season rolls around, oh boy!
4. The lovely ladies at Auburn Estates find it sexy — “Hey, wanna go back to my place and make calls on my rotary phone?”
3. Quality and safety. Quality and safety. I’ll say it again, quality and safety. My man at the Maine Public Advocate’s Office, Wayne “The Brain” Jortner, says you can’t beat a landline for the best sound quality. No static. No dropped calls. No chance my bookie will miss my bet. And when you have baby #12 Heather, Sir Jortner says the surest call to 911 is from a landline. Don’t leave little Marvin-to-be to the fate of a pesky cell phone, PLEASE!
2. It’s great fun to pick up the extension and eavesdrop on calls relatives make when they stay with me. (And when I overlay their conversation with the video from the clock radio cam in the guest bedroom, now that’s entertainment!) What? What’s wrong with that?
1. Finally, when was the last time you screened calls LIVE on your cell phone, Heather? Oh, snap! Boss tries to reach me to come into work? Screened! Probation officer wants to chat? Screened! Hot “entertainer” from Bodies in Motion calls? Helllllloooo!
But don’t worry, Heather. When your hell pho …er, cell phone stops working or you lose it or it falls into your ice-fishing hole, you can come over and use my landline. Just bring some bills. The pay phone I installed for my cell phone friends only takes Lincolns.
mmogensen@sunjournal.com
Chats, apps and shopping, oh my!
By Heather McCarthy, Senior Designer
Landline? Really, Mark? Really?
It’s time to cut the cord, man.
Sure, landlines were fine “back in the day” when families spent actual — as opposed to virtual — face time together. (Hey, I hope this cell phone camera doesn’t add 10 pounds.) But today, even sweet, old Aunt Bertha has gone wireless. In fact, she’s probably on her iPhone right now trying to text you. Oh, wait… you can’t get text messages on your LANDLINE … too bad.
Nowadays, when I’m browsing Facebook profiles on my iPhone while reading wordPress blog posts and simultaneously watching the latest episode of Top Chef on my GoogleTV, the last thing I want to do is get up to answer a ringing phone to take a call from a total stranger, who is utterly determined to “make my day.”
Yeah, I’m going to really miss THAT interruption. Or the third — yes, that’s right — third call from (fill-in-the-blank-charity) thanking me, yet again, for donating … and asking me, yet again, to donate MORE MONEY!!!
I will admit, though, I DO miss those cathartic, conversation-stopping, mid-sentence hang-ups. “I’m not interested, thank you.” Click. Ahhhhh…..
I will also admit I DON’T miss the mid-sentence-hang-up guilt hangover. Hey, I DO have a conscience, you know.
And speaking of cats (you knew I’d work them in), I no longer have to wrestle Fred for my messages. With my cell phone safely tucked in my purse, Fred can no longer wile away his days sitting on the answer phone, playing my messages. I actually GET my messages.
I am, to put it literally, movin’ on.
Just how sweet is home, really, when there are so many better places to be: like the office, Walmart, the mall, Walmart, the coffee shop, the car, Walmart. Why should I stay home and wait for your call? Hey, if I wanted to talk to you, I’d give you my cell phone number.
As my BFF says, “My home is where my phone is.”
There was a time, I admit, that I lusted after a rotary dial phone: She was a smart little number, the pink Slimline model called “The Princess.” I was pretty sure I’d look and sound prettier (especially to boys) if I were talking on one. But we’ll never know. My parents made sure I/we never had anything fancier than a behemoth of a black rotary dial phone that could break your foot if you pulled the short receiver cord too hard and dragged it off the desk.
Landlines were hot — ONCE UPON A TIME — like back when I thought the Monkees were hot (I had a crush on Peter Tork and the air guitar hadn’t been invented).
But I grew up (well, somewhat) and so did technology.
And I’m not alone in thinking that landline technology is practically prehistoric. Alexander Graham Bell — that’s right, the man who is credited by many with having invented the telephone — said a later invention of his was “the greatest invention (I have) ever made, greater than the telephone.” And what later invention could that have been? Well, naturally, a wireless phone! (Four years after having patented the telephone, Edison patented the photophone, which transmitted voice sounds using light waves.)
He was on to something, Mark. You’re not.
So while you’re at home, listening to Foreigner and watching VHS tapes of old C.H.I.P.S. episodes, inexplicably wearing Ray-Bans, one ear glued to your home phone, talking to your brother about his lumbago, I’ll be out … out there somewhere … probably at Walmart. But, at least I’ll be able to check my work e-mails, watch the newest “Eclipse” movie, order dinner, find a nearby Timmy Ho’s and update my Facebook status — “Shopping at Walmart” — all on my cell phone.
Thomas Wolfe was right, you can’t go home again. But you CAN take it with you.
And I do.
hmccarthy@sunjournal.com
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