Landline Lessons
The Atlantic had an article about the things lost when people give up their landline, and one of them is that we now go directly to the person we want to speak to by calling their line instead of making small talk with whoever picks up the phone.
It seems like such a small thing, but it’s true — needing to navigate parents and siblings to get to my friends gave me conversational practice that some kids could benefit from today. I say “some” because some kids pick up small talk even without the telephone situation, but others could have benefited from having to speak to random adults at a young age.
But even if it’s not small talk, kids will never get the excitement of having the family phone ring and wondering if it’s for them, or getting to talk to an older sibling on the way to a friend, or even waiting their turn for the line.
5 comments
We still have a landline because it is included in the package deal with get through our HOA and it is so handy to use for to do list calls. But we have the ringers turned off and never give anyone the phone number for incoming calls because it gets so many spam calls that it is intolerable.
I have had to specifically teach my kids phone etiquette because they aren’t learning it organically via the shared house phone. It is a loss. I need to spend some time making them learn how to do appointment calls and information calls too so that they can grow up into functional adults.
We have a house phone that’s not exactly a land line (it’s works via the internet connection) – we use it quite a bit because our cell phones have terrible reception inside the house.
Also, our kids use/used it to call their friends before they had cell phones (only 1 kid is currently without a cell phone).
I used to absolutely hate making phone calls as a kid. Getting someone on the phone other than the person I wanted to talk to always threw me off and was very anxiety-inducing.
HereWeGoAJen – that’s a very good point, I do need to spend time to teach our kids phone etiquette and how to make appointment calls…. (extra hard because I don’t think I have it figured out myself).
More and more things are done online now, including setting up appointments, resolving scheduling conflicts, etc. Perhaps phone calls will become obsolete in another 10 years….
We still have a “home phone” — three sets — two cordless and one with a cord — albeit (like Natka above) they run off the Internet and it isn’t a true landline. We did have a landline back at the house. I was determined to keep it as long as I could, and was disappointed when I realized the service here was actually Internet-based. I’ll never forget the big power outage/blackout in August 2003: our CEO was at home, the cellphone waves were jammed because so many people were using their cellphones, and he couldn’t figure out why no one was calling him at the house to update him on what was going on. Eventually, he realized they didn’t have a corded phone! — and none of the cordless sets they did have would work without power. One of the security guys wound up driving to his house with an old corded set they managed to scrounge up from storage!
I saw a video on YouTube a while back of some teenagers trying to figure out how to use an old dial telephone. It was both hilarious and terrifying to watch! (A couple of them eventually figured out how to operate the dial, but they didn’t realize you had to lift up the receiver and listen for the dial tone before you started dialling!) I wonder what they would think of party lines?? (The section of town my best friend lived in, on the very outskirts, still operated under a party line system. This was in the late 1970s.)
Haha! I grew up with a party line, living out in the country. If we could hear roosters through the phone, we knew the nosy neighbour down the road was listening in! lol Our ring was short long short. We had to check when we lifted the phone that it was not already being used. Maybe one of the reasons I’ve never liked talking on the phone! I certainly never got excited when the phone rang.
Once my FIL died, we stopped having a landline. (He couldn’t handle the concept of ringing a cellphone.) I do lament the passing of the landline though, and especially the passing of telephone books, when you could track down people you knew, or needed to contact.
How are kids supposed to hear an endless run of Dad jokes from other dads, if not via the landline phone? My dad’s favorite: Hello? Who? Nobody by that name lives here! AHAHAHAHAHA – just a minute.