Airman, you sound like my dad talking about TV, or old people talking about the internet. Hell, like my grandparents telling me about how they didn’t even HAVE cars when they were growing up, and why do we need so many…or those damn air plane contraptions?? They didn’t even have planes when they were kids, and if horses and mules were good enough for the their grand parents, then they should be good enough for us too! 
-XT
Your grandparents had horses and mules?! Luxury
Well…they had A mule, anyway. My dad too. And chickens, a couple goats and other assorted livestock. No horse though. They were practically rich, by Mexican standards at least.
-XT
Yeah, well, I’m something of a troglodyte in that regard. I think that the change that has come from cell phones is almost entirely negative. I have one only because my mother got it for me so that I could respond to emergencies involving my son. I would have been perfectly content to stick with landlines my entire life.
And don’t get me started on text messages. If it’s important enough to text it’s important enough to call. If it’s not important don’t bother me.
My son is going to bug me for a cell phone one of these years. Over my dead body will he get a cell phone before he gets a drivers license. And even then I will refuse to call him unless he’s breaking curfew, and then only because I won’t have a landline number to call by the time he’s that old.
So yeah, I suspect I’m more like your dad or your grandparents than you might imagine. I’m too young to be that guy, but there you are.
If you had AT&T as a provider, would you notice.
Declan
Nothing. It was a pure hypothetical. (One that I cannot envisage happening without a great deal more general, electronic, mayhem)
It was only the mobile aspect that I was interested in. Until xtisme pointed it out I was unaware that companies had ditched desk phones in favour of routing calls to people’s mobiles.
One of my last projects was with an electrical company; their remote control systems work “by radio”, only it’s not really radio. That’s what they call it as a linguistic throwback, but the remotes are actually using the wireless phone network. Curiously enough, one of the products my current client sells is exactly that kind of remotes.
Not only would their remote control systems be disrupted, but the whole supply chain would have to be reworked. Forget about having just a few key supplies in the van and being able to call ahead to the warehouse if you happen to need anything else: finding out that you need extra parts would mean needing to drive back from the ass-end of nowhere to civilization before you could establish communication. Disruptions would take a lot longer to fix.
I suspect the entire business sector is now based on cell phones. For instance, there is less office space per employee, because employees don’t always have to be in their office; likewise, there are far fewer secretaries, because there doesn’t Always have to be someone to answer the phone. And of course, the biggest casualty of a cell phone disappearance would be the coffee shop industry. People will spend roughly one tenth of the time they currently spend in coffee shops and restaurants once they can no longer be contacted by phone. Cafe culture would instantly drop to 1970’s levels, costing millions of people their jobs.
In other words: even if you could restructure the entire business world, by hiring and firing hundreds of thousands of people and re-allocating millions of square feet of office space, it wouldn’t matter. Such a huge upheaval to the economy would almost certainly lead to a major recession, or even a depression. Things would *not *be fixed in a few hours.
Oooh! ‘Months’ of disrupted business practices eh? Pretty much the text book definition of Armageddon.
We’d get by just fine using land lines, email or just plain being human and improvising.
Sheeesh.
This is satire, right?
Hardly. In fact, I’m pretty sure I understated the potential consequences.
a lot of small businesses I’ve dealt with for things like home repairs and such can only be reached on their cell phone. I guess they could put in a land line and a answering machine and check in periodically using pay phones. The trouble is that most pay phones have disappeared in the last 10 years and I suspect that there might be carnage competing for the remaining ones.
BTW, are we going to assume beepers are working or not? I remember when a beeper and a bunch of quarters were something I always had with me.
I mainly apologized because I know that many people are sensitive about their name, and I have internalized that to the point of feeling names are sancrosanct. In my misspent youth I would twit with people by messing with their username, but no more; I would sooner call you a [censored for GD] than misspell your name.
Certainly if you yanked out the land lines too there would be a major worldwide paradigm shift, possibly (but not certainly) crippling cross-country and cross-continental industry beyond recovery. But cell phones are just not that big a deal. And frankly in my opinion, you are making that argument for me. “Without a cell phone, people on call would have to stay home…like they used to.” “Without a cell phone, truckers couldn’t be called and told to turn around and fetch a late shipment…it would have to be shipped the next day, since it was late.” (Um, do they seriously turn trucks around for that?)
You’re playing up things like people having to come in to work as a major cataclysm. From where I stand, that’s pretty clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel. Cell phones are handy, no doubt*. But they are not the foundation upon which all modern business is built.
Especially since in magic-hypothetical-land, the alternatives remain. Are you desperate to be able to stay in contact while simultaneously strolling down to the bistro down the block? Then carry a two-way radio. Oh no, it’s bigger, and less convenient to carry; we will surely all die. Debatably pagers are still allowed as well, which dissolves even more of the problems.
The one point I will hand you is that the turnover would be, in some cases, fairly expensive, and somewhat time-consuming. I don’t grant that the magnitude of the problem will itself be a problem, except in countries that missed the land-line revolution. Your fire department and police department will deal with having to come in to work. They may whine more, but this whining will not end civilization. Similarly, any business that makes its money on its employees being contactable will make damn sure that you’re contactable. If this entails a week’s loss of business while setting it up, well, everyone else will be on vacation too. The only losses will be brief lost revenue, and some upgrade costs. And lots of whining.
I agree we disagree. You’re making a mountain out of a speed bump, and I’m making a speed bump out of a speed bump. It would cause that jolt of upheaval, and a few people might bump their heads on the roof of the car, but society would not be in for a prolonged uphill climb.
I don’t think there would be widespread panic at all because it’s only been fifteen years! Plenty of people remember what it was like before. And that’s not counting all of the holdouts like Airman and I that got cellphones only reluctantly. Hell, I have a cellphone and I rarely use the thing. I’d just help my poor cellphone-lacking brethren. It isn’t the same as cars, or running water - those have been around a lot longer. Get back to me when the entire generation of people has only been raised on cellphones and all of the old people are dead. Of course, I will be too.
Even if you had an entire planet of people who would stare uncomprehendingly at a desktop phone, it would still only require a very, very short training seminar in the use thereof. (“That thing where you wander away from your desk while talking? Don’t.”) To get real effects from the cellphone meltdown you need to wait for the phone lines to decompose to the point of non-functionality. If that happened, or if you’re talking about an area that never had land lines laid, then you’re talking about probably a month or two of upheaval, before people get reconnected.
Admittedly, by the time all of us holdouts* are dead (I’m only 34), the land lines may have all been scavenged for their copper wiring the same way some railroad tracks have apparently been pillaged for cheap iron. But the problem still wouldn’t be the foreignness of a phone with a cord.
[QUOTE=begbert2]
You’re playing up things like people having to come in to work as a major cataclysm
[/QUOTE]
And you are speaking about something you obviously don’t have a good grasp on. ‘Having to come in to work’, as you put it, is only ONE part of the change…and even that change will effect companies bottom lines, their business and operations flows, and of course their employees lives. You’d need to restaff, bring in additional lines, change your SOP’s…a whole host of things that you are, frankly, ignorant of, or you wouldn’t be speaking as you are.
You admit you don’t really use a cell phone, obviously it’s not something you use extensively for work (so your work, whatever it is, isn’t dependent on them), and you don’t seem to have a technical background, so you are basing your uneducated opinion, frankly, on your own limited experience. That would be like me saying that, based on my uninformed opinion, we could get by just fine without antibiotics, if they suddenly stopped working, and it would only take us a few days to retool to do something else. Really? I have no idea, but since I don’t work with the things every day, doesn’t seem to be a big problem to me (hypothetically).
Things always look minor when you don’t have any experience with them. It’s easy to say that this technology or that one isn’t important when you don’t use it, and when your work isn’t dependent on it (that you know of).
I’ve tried to point out how there would be a cascade effect, with multiple sectors of business AND government services impacted all at once. You don’t seem to either grasp that this is a problem, or you think it would be easily overcome. I think it would be neither. I think the key is that it would be a lot of little problems, and a few really big ones, and that initially at least it those problems would compound each other. Even though any one problem would be easy to overcome, it’s the accumulation of problems that causes situations to get out of control.
Not really using one much, what do you base this assessment on exactly? A lot of things are not the ‘foundation’ of business, yet if you take them away it causes a large disruption in the flow of business, as businesses have to go back and restaff/retool their operations and flow. If one sector has to do this, well, that’s usually a problem, and even then there is usually a cascade effect as it effects other, secondary or subsidiary businesses. If ALL of the sectors have a problem, then the problems start to compound, as a disruption in production here while the company retools it’s practices and infrastructure and restaffs effects inventory there, and as they have to do the same thing, it has an effect somewhere else. Throw in the disruption to government too and you have quite a mess that I think will take a bit longer than a few days or a week or two to get over.
[QUOTE=Anaamika]
I don’t think there would be widespread panic at all because it’s only been fifteen years!
[/QUOTE]
This has been repeated several times, and my question is why do people think that ‘only’ ‘fifteen years’ is important or significant? Think of the technological changes in that time period…as well as the social changes in our use of technology. A mere 15 years ago the internet wasn’t nearly as important as it is today. 15 years ago, a major internet outage would have been an inconvenience…today it would be a major problem (well, for those of us who think that taking away a technology would have an impact of more than a few days and simply cause people to have to go back into the office :p).
-XT
Because there are still lots of people who remember the old way! How is that not different? And not old fuddy duddies either. I am 34 and I still use my landline. I will train you on how to use a regular phone, I promise.
I am not saying major changes will not have to take place, but I don’t think it will be anything like widespread panic. Disappointment, loss of money, some anger, but we’ll get over it as a species. I really think we will.
All of the examples you provided earlier just make me go “Bwuh?” It wasn’t that long ago that I did have to walk to the nearest exit when my car broke down. I never get my doctor on the road, I always call his office. Only two years ago my cell phone was dead and I was supposed to meet my SO and we missed each other and searched for each other for a half an hour before we met.
If you took away ALL phones then maybe. But we still have the phone system - just no cell phones.
[QUOTE=Anaamika]
Because there are still lots of people who remember the old way! How is that not different? And not old fuddy duddies either. I am 34 and I still use my landline. I will train you on how to use a regular phone, I promise.
[/QUOTE]
Seriously…it’s not about not knowing how to use a land line. Either I’m explaining myself badly or you and others aren’t hearing what I’m trying to say if this is what you think the point being made is.
-XT
The fact that it’s only been 15 years is important because your entire argument is “we can’t possibly go back/” The thing is, in any place which is currently wired for land lines, we can go back. Easily. Trivially, in most cases.
You can go on all you like how you need your cell phone to do business, and how it’s not possible for people to ‘adapt’ to the way they already were doing things not so long ago, but it continues to ring hollow. Your somewhat-justfied statement that I am ignorant of how cell phones effect companies’ bottom lines, their business and operations flows, and (of course) their employees lives is automatically countered by the fact that it worked pretty darned well before, and it can work pretty darned well again.
This statement is unambiguously true: “only companies which are of a type that did not exist fifteen years ago are at risk of being cripplingly handicapped by the loss of cell phones.” This is simply not arguable. The same goes for business models; yes, the business model where you do all your business while driving around and eating in restraunts and sitting in movie theaters would end, because it’s new. We could indeed be thrust back to the dark ages of 1995.
The thing you’re not getting - as is clearly evident when you compare losing phones to the loss of cars or antibiotics or even the internet, is that 1995 was not all that primitive. Business chugged along just fine. Heh, arguably it chugged along better, though it’s not really fair to blame the cell phones for the current recession. (I think not, anyway.)
And as for your ‘cascade’ effect, as everybody “retools” their practices and infrastructure and restaffs - this retooling is, specifically, buying desk phones. (Or possibly digging the old ones out of storage!) It’s “training” people to do what they were doing ten years ago! It’s hiring a minimum-wager to sit at a desk and answer phones and push puttons. It may even require them to buy the desk!
I stand by my statement. Any company that can’t handle this within a week deserves to take the hit, and any company that can’t handle this at all is clearly no longer needed.
Seriously…it’s not about not knowing how to use a land line. Either I’m explaining myself badly or you and others aren’t hearing what I’m trying to say if this is what you think the point being made is.
-XT
[/QUOTE]
I think our point is that while there may well be business models that have been invented in the last ten years which rely on cell phones, well, there are still people around who remember the old business models, and any business that’s been around longer than that probably still has all the old policy manuals lying around from back then. (Including most hospitals, fire stations, police stations, and government offices, nach.) We’re all well aware that that some lifestyles would have to change. What we’re also aware of is that the changes required are not particularly arduous or outrageous.