phone behavior

[calimac]

Yeah, I've seen the videos in which young people are presented with a dial telephone and try to figure out how it works. I haven't forgotten the time I saw a phone book from the 1910s with detailed instructions on how to dial a phone, that being quite a new technology then.

But I've just had a personal encounter with unfamiliarity with other aspects of old-fashioned phone behavior.

It was a call to establish a medical appointment. The young-sounding woman on the line said she'd tried to call before, but had gotten a beeping sound. That's called a busy signal. I don't have voice mail on this phone.

Then she said, if you need to call back to change the appointment, use the number displaying on your phone. My phone does not display numbers. She had to read it to me.

Of course, none of this would be true if the call had been on my cell phone, but I don't like using the cell phone when I'm at home. (Partly because reception is bad here. We're one mile from Apple world headquarters, but that doesn't mean we have a good cell signal.) I use the good old-fashioned landline.

Comments

[wild_patience]

plus using phones like we have costs money. I hate paying 35 cents a minute to be on hold so I call from the land line. Folks chiming in that their plan has unlimited calling: how much does that plan cost you? $0.35 a minute for calls and $0.20 for texts is cheaper if you don't use your phone much.

[cmcmck]

Our own landline does display callers and numbers and has a phone book but it's a high end call blocking model.

[voidampersand]

A believable modern horror movie would begin with the cell service going out.