According to this 40% of households had one in 1990 or so and that was twice as many as had one four years earlier. And remember, home answering machines were almost unheard of when you had to lease your equipment from the phone company ( which only ended with the Bell breakup around 1984). Voicemail got common around 2000 so there was just a short period of time where answering machines were sort of common - someone born in 1985 may never have knowingly encountered the machines if they didn’t have one in their own home. If I call you and get a recording asking me to leave a message, the only way I know it’s a machine rather than a voicemail is if you pick up as I’m leaving the message.* And if you don’t pick up, I obviously won’t know if you heard me leaving the message.
* although that may not be true anymore with iphones
This should go into a Things That Really Were Better in the Old Days thread. My wife and I never* pick up the phone without waiting to hear if a message accompanies the call. Why would we ever want to give up such a luxury?
* Unless we’re expecting a callback or recognize the name instantly. Both rare.
The other Thing That Really Was Better was that if someone called you, they had a good reason. And it was important.
Because, when you were calling someone’s corded landline, they couldn’t just chat while they went about their day. You were tethering them to a 6-foot radius from a spot on their kitchen wall.
Though I often saw moms on TV sitcoms just calling to chat about nothing, so maybe people here had relatives like that… if so, you have much sympathy (my mom thinks I have time to just sit and listen to her. She always asks what I’'m doing, and if I’m cleaning or doing laundry or walking dogs she seems miffed that I’m multi-tasking.
As I grew older I realized that my mom - who couldn’t drive, and besides my father took our one car to work - was stuck in a very small apartment all day and spent years going stir-crazy from the isolation.
Except that she had a couple of close friends who were in the same predicament that she called every day just to make contact with other people.
That telephone was a lifeline for her and the others. I don’t begrudge her a minute.
Or the way that the Dope acts as a lifeline for people.
My Grandmother maintained both phone calls connections and extensive letter writing connections with a bunch of people she didn’t want to lose touch with.
Hehe, I hate the phone because it now makes me now focus on the caller, and it makes it very hard to do what I was doing before they called. As a little kid, my mother was horrified to hear me say “So is that all you called about? Because I was doing X, and I’m going to go back to doing X right now if that’s all you needed.”
I mean, they probably only lived a few blocks away. If they wanted to aimlessly talk to me while I was doing stuff, they could walk on over. Still seems pretty logical to me. Mom loved to chat, and was still horrified after my explanation.
If they called to chat it was because they were OK with themselves being tethered to 6 (or 25) feet of the wall. For many people then, and some now, how the caller might impact the callee is simply immaterial. To the caller.
To the degree the caller thought of it at all, they’d expect the callee to tell them if there wasn’t time or interest to yak just then. And of course reserve the right to become mightily miffed if the callee had the temerity to actually do that.
Now that we have text I find people, myself included, far more reticent to call no-notice without asking permission via text first. (“Lieutenant SMS: Open a hailing frequency!”). And implicitly if not explicitly soliciting a better time to talk if now is not it.
