I can remember my mother getting annoyed after picking up the phone one day and hearing a dial tone…“Why do people call and only let the phone ring 8 times before they hang up!”
To this day, my dad puts his cellphone on the charger at the end of the bar, right where the kitchen phone was once mounted. He can’t seem to grasp the idea that it goes to voicemail after 4 rings, there’s no way to change that, and by the time he hears it ringing, it’s probably already on the 2nd or 3rd ring, and there’s no way he’s going to get to it in time to answer it. And trying to figure out who the missed call is from is way beyond his technical ability.
Yep, but if you do it too much to one number, the Ma Bell Investigators would call that number and ask a lot of pointed questions about who they were getting calls from in Wayside, PA. Don’t ask me how I know this.
$300 for that? Please tell me that is a joke site?
If you really wanted that, you could get one of those $40 devices that you can plug your cell into that makes your phone jacks in the house live and buy an old Ma Bell phone to plug into another outlet.
Maybe I’m being whooshed, but that would be like paying $600 to have my new bluetooth stereo system piped into an old Victrola hand crank player.
We pretty much missed out on the cordless/push-button era and went straight to mobiles.
Right up until I left home to go to university in the mid-90s (and for a few years after that I think), we just had the one phone, which looked like this (that’s the exact same colour, and everything!). There was a disc of old yellowing paper under the clear plastic in the middle of the dial, with our original four-digit phone number typed on it (two digits had been added to the front to make it six digits before I was born, or certainly before I can remember).
But yeah, I remember waiting till 6pm for the cheap rate, and not speaking to people on “national-rate” calls for too long. As we only had the one phone, I used to go to the phone box down the road for nefarious or embarrassing teenage phone calls, which used to cost me a fortune.
Also I recall there were separate “local codes”, which were different from the national area code. E.g. my area code was 0252, and the next town along was 0276, but if I wanted to call someone there, because it was an adjacent area I could just dial a shorter code, I think it was 92. I’m not sure how that worked, now I come to think of it.
Later I bought the house off my parents and we do actually have a cordless phone now, not that we ever use it.
I still have that old phone in the attic, although technically it is British Telecom property as it was only ever rented. They’ve never asked for it back, though, even after we switched to a cable TV and phone provider. We had to switch numbers, which is a shame as we don’t have the phone number I grew up with any more.
BTW I’ve never had a phone with caller ID display, apart from my mobile phone. I don’t know many people whose landline has it, either - I just don’t think it’s that common a thing in the UK.
On this side of the pond, Verizon has for several years offered a pretty reasonable flat rate for all your domestic phone calls, long distance or not, and they throw several other doodads in, caller ID among them. That’s when we got caller ID, and now I can’t imagine not having it. If we don’t recognize the number (or even when we do, for certain callers), we let the answering machine pick up. Saves us from having to deal with people calling to raise money for some charity or another, and we seem to get a lot of those calls.
Oh, I’m sure I could have caller ID for a minimal charge, but hardly anyone I know has a phone with a digital display that would show it. Mine certainly doesn’t. Maybe all my friends have really old phones, too.
My office phone at work has, of course, but that’s different.
My land line has a display for caller ID, and I got that phone as a gift maybe 5 years ago. The display sometimes doesn’t function anymore, but a synthesized voice speaks to me. I don’t even have to get up to look who’s calling.
Maybe, or it may be a difference in what’s in the stores here v. there. Over here, I think you’d have a harder time buying a phone without a display than with one. This is especially true with cordless landline phones, which are much more common than corded landlines these days over here, AFAICT.
When I’m house sitting I always answer the phone “Smith residence , John speaking.”
While in the Army one always answered the phone "Headquarters company, Corporal John speaking, SIR!
If you forgot the “Sir” your ass was grass. Or at least mowing it.
Yes, they let it ring longer. Because there were fewer phones in the house, and people had to go somewhere to answer it. Many houses had at most 1 phone per floor.
HAH! WHAT did your MOM know! We were suppose to have our flying cars by now!
I have a rotary phone that in the event of a power outage and the phones still work, but since everything is hooked through the answering system won’t work, I plug in the rotary phone.
I also like banging out a letter or envelope on my portable smith corona typewriter that I scored for $1 at a garage sale.
