A newfangled, old-fashioned telephone

In the past several months I’ve spent a lot of time and effort dealing with telephones. Not answering or making calls, but putting up with them.

It took me a while to warm up to cell phones when they first hit the market. I finally got one, and although I appreciated its value over a pay phone in an emergency, most of the time I’d forget to recharge it. They don’t work so good when they’re not recharged.

Last summer the Big Phone Company said they’d give customers a new cell phone because the old cells were no longer hooked up to the towers. The freebie phone was so tiny I couldn’t keep track of it, and I couldn’t hear the silly thing ring. I decided to upgrade and got an iPhone. I wanted an iPhone anyway. It seemed convenient to be able to check my email on it.

It also made me wonder what Alexander Graham Bell might think, after all the effort it took for him to make sure people at a distance could talk to each other, about a phone that enables you to write messages to people, or check the weather, or read the news. I’m sure my iPhone can do everything but scratch my back, but I learned enough about it to make it useful to me.

Unlike a lot of people, I kept my landline. It doesn’t need recharging like the cell phone does, so I know I’ll have phone service if I’m home. A few years back I got a snazzy cordless phone with caller ID and a built-in recording machine. The buttons on it were on the handset. I could walk around the house and talk at the same time to prove I was coordinated.

Recently its battery gave up and I’d often hear little beeps until eventually I heard nothing. The battery had run out and after recharging, it seemed to hold less and less of a charge. So — do I get a new battery or a new phone? They cost about the same.

One issue I had with it was when I tried to follow prompts — “if you are calling to place an order, press 1. To talk to a human being, hold your breath.” By the time I heard the instructions, pressed the appropriate number and put the handset back to my ear, the recording was off on a tangent somewhere else. And the buttons were so small I frequently pushed the wrong one. By the time I finished what I needed to do, I’d made five or six separate calls.

So I set out in search of the perfect phone, and I FOUND IT! It has buttons large enough that I don’t miss hitting the right number. And the keypad is separate from the handset. It doesn’t need a battery, except to keep the Caller ID display going. It looks like the kind of phones we all used 40 years ago because that’s all there was to use. I can still walk around and talk on it because it came with an extra-long cord. It doesn’t send text messages or receive them, but isn’t the whole purpose of a telephone to be able to TALK to someone?

It just goes to show, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Having that old-fashioned desk phone the Big Phone Company still makes is a step in the right direction.  

Alexander Graham Bell would be proud! Or maybe relieved.