We had 2 landlines-one for personal use and one for business from our home office. Both phones rang several times a day with spam calls. It got to the point that we only answered callers who we recognized by caller ID or who left messages we wished to respond to. In the meantime the frequent ringing was disturbing and disruptive. We retired and decided at that time to get rid of our landlines. Our arrangement eliminates the ringing when someone tries to call in and caller ID but it allows us to use the landline to call out in an emergency for a dime a minute. We still have our cell phones. But oh, the silence that is possible for long periods of time with no landlines ringing away. Still, I miss the landline for every reason given in this op-ed piece.
16
The landline of old doesn't exist because of robocalls. We have a landline. It rings endlessly. One ring, then silence, as the robocall protector kicks in. Sometimes it rings several times, we answer, it is either a recorded voice pitching something or a human voice, pitching something. Never is it a voice to which I might respond by calling, "Roger, it's for you."
23
I still have a landline, and only a landline. It never fades in and out and never has to be charged. And I still read The Times on the subway. And as you may have guessed, I don't have that many more years to live. But I've enjoyed every one of them!
74
Enjoy your landline. Perhaps you can enjoy trying to consolidate your credit card debt. Or extending your car's warranty. Maybe you will get worried when the IRS calls and demands payment in Amazon Gift Cards. Maybe you'll see right through that but get caught when the bank calls to verify your password. You can while away the day conversing with these numbers that will call you:
Unavailable
800-000-0000
Any number from your town or the next town
Anonymous
Oh yeah - if you do pick up expect to wait 10 seconds until the millennial in India puts down his cell phone to talk to you. He's busy and wasn't expecting you to be gullible enough to answer the phone.
I still have a landline but I have nomorobo.com
9
wow. The comments say something about the NYT demographic! l Only two reasons to have a land line: 1 unreliable cell service. If we did not have a land line in VT would be a real challenge. or 2. cuz you are cheap. we have a land line in Brooklyn cuz there is no other option for Internet unless we pay for cable and crap why would we do that? we stream - old school DSL still does the job and we don’t have a zillion channels of crap.
13
Even before texting, so much human communication disappeared with the telephone: the face, gesture, proximity, even scent. But there’s another front on the evisceration of communication caused by the dumb-phone -- infernal texting, which multiplies the alienation Cohen so fervently describes.
On the phone, the one you speak to, you hear tone of voice, hesitation, thoughts being refined, the back and forth of “normal” conversation: “No, you don’t quite understand …” Your conversation meanders, expands, returns to the starting point. You create something.
A text is like the third Comintern: I issue a proclamation, and you respond with a counter-proclamation, misconstruing my brilliant original. I back up and repeat. “Blah, blah and counter-blah.”
Sure, texting prevents overhearing awesomely inane conversations on the street. But in the long, twilight struggle between Samuel F.B. Morse, the original texter, and Alexander Graham Bell, count me in with the voiceman!
9
Mr. Cohen, I am fighting a losing battle, but I will not quit. I give out my landline number not my cell one. I use my cell for emergencies and other urgent busness only. My cell provider is incapable of understanding that I do not not need multiple gigs of data, hours of talk and unlimited texts.
My landline gets the use, it has a robo call blocker on it that works about 95% of the time and I can see who is calling. When I go out for dinner, and look around me, I see countless couples with no conversation between them staring at their "Smartphone" texting heaven know who and maybe each other.
Now a group wants to allow cell phones on flights. NO, NO, NO!. Do not deny us our last refuge from instant communication thereby interrupting conversation between my wife and myself. On a clear morning, last June, I awoke to see the sunrise, at 38,000 feet, over the French coast enroute to Zurich. Why in the world would anyone want to miss that view. Put down your damned phones and live.
40
While you were being metaphoric when you compared a dial tone to an orchestra tuning its instruments, that’s precisely how we used it in the dark ages before electronic tuners became affordable. A perfect 440 Hz, the dial tone served as a common note we could all tune our A strings to for our college jam sessions. In the dorms, where few people had phones in their rooms, we sometimes had to drop a dime into the pay phone to get a tone (after walking five miles uphill in the snow, that is).
17
I stubbornly refuse to give up my landline. A cell phone lives in my handbag, for emergencies away from home, but it is turned off. The one concession to not answering every call that comes in on the land line is the answering machine. That way I can avoid wasting my time telling the caller I am not interested in the product he is selling.
16
I think robocalls did in the landline. 'Do not call' list be damned, our's was nonstop robocalls. AT&T, with their network-wide view of their system, knew who these guys were and did nothing to stop them. The government, spying on our phone traffic, and with our name on their 'do not call' list did nothing to stop them. I'm fairly cynical about the government, especially now. But the 'do not call' list certainly did not help.
Now the robocallers have found my iPhone, and call me at work. And I ignore my phone, most of the time. So that's progress.
And progress for you will be an Amazon Echo. The focal point of your apartment. Perched on a ledge by the window.
11
Still have a landline here in our home.
It is superior to a cell phone in a number of ways, and way more reliable connection wise.
Yes.. we have cell phones as well.. but everyone I know knows that I will not answer my cell phone when I am at home and they best call me on the landline. Yeah.. you can text me, but I may or may not text back. I prefer to talk live rather then the poor english and emoji hell of todays texting.
My cell phone gets used when I am out and about.. because you need the ability to text and chat with family at times. My wife uses hers a lot more, mainly due to work related calls and texts, and my daughter and her cell phone are siamese twins of sorts... and I have literally never seen her use the land line at home.. not that she actually uses the phone capability of her cell phone anyway.
8
It is nice to know that nostalgia and the land line has not died. I must confess i have a land line and it is fine as I can pace around the house while talking, but put it away on its cradle and forget it.
I also have a cell phone which I am always forgetting to put in my pocket, perhaps deliberately? It is good for emergencies of all kinds, but the thing still mystifies me, something out of Dick Tracey.
To be constantly connected and on guard for that strange music which you must disconnect during communal events seems to be like having a rope around my neck directing each of my movements. How nice it is to walk away and just be with yourself. My navel is fine thank yo.
6
I still have a landline. It is used today by siblings as old as I am, and by telemarketers targeting seniors. I have a call blocking service, but the thing rings constantly. Most real calls come over the cellphone. My ringtone is the sound of an old fashioned black phone of yore.
5
We are all ... commodities
3
I love the memory of my big sister in the closet, the long receiver cord stretched to capacity, talking to her boyfriend without us listening in. I love the memory of the busy signal’s efficiency: call back, don’t expect whomever you called to call you back. No phone tag! I even love the rotary dial: it was slower but so was the pace of life.
20
Observe how this article begins as a supposedly innocuous ode to landline phones and—by the thirteenth or fourteenth paragraph—metastasizes into "angry Boomer yelling at cloud" and reminding us that youths today are not all right.
Okay, okay—we get it—we get it! The "young" whippersnappers using cellphones—Gen X'ers, Millennials, and Gen Z's—are destroyers of civilization. In contrast, Boomers cradling their landline phones are God's Chosen. We get it. Boomers are amazing, and everyone else is a dismal failure. We get it. Enough. Basta. Stop. Please.
2
Why is there a gourd?
8
LOL
Now if someone can text my horse, I'll be on my way.
1
Days after Hurricane Andrew, in South Florida Bell South erected cell towers and went around pulling out pay phones. Of course years back they’d removed phone booths. Ma Bell and her evil spawn!
3
So many great posts here. So personal addressing our daitly lives. No mention of he who shall not be named. . .Oh no my obsession sis showing.
5
This past year, after 33 years with the number, we ditched our landline. I didn't want to - I really dislike my cellphone - but the incessant robocalls forced our hand. I don't have voicemail set up on my cellphone - if I recognize the number, I'll call back. Or just send me a text that says, "call me."
But I do appreciate the memories of landlines 30-40 years ago. There was the boyfriend that would call me from his night job pumping gas (New Jersey, you know); if a customer came in and the bell rang (remember the "ding ding" when you drove up to the pump?), he'd put the phone down while he went out to pump gas. Then, when I had a falling out with that guy, there was the guy who called me on the landline to check on me because he knew I was upset. Yeah, I married him.
9
Ah, old landline phones and the $15 a month phone bill. Sigh.
We got rid of our landline when in a three month period the only calls we got on it were Rachel from card services. She pesters us no more.
72
You are only as much a slave to the mobile phone as you choose to be.
Look at the Amish. They have mobile phones as a necessity of dealing with 'the English', but they check them at the door when they go home.
4
Thank you Roger Cohen. What a sweet piece you wrote.
I'm still living in that concrete world, mainly. Full of animals and landscapes and people walking around. Yes, many of them weaving and not looking where they are walking.
I use a cheap smartphone when on trips and when I go to jobs; that's it. I suppose I should call the device I am using now to type, my "landcomputer." I don't hate technology, but managing so far to not keep it in my pocket. What's the rush?
It's bigger than phoning though, I think, the changes in our psychological orientations as billions of connected users with our sped-up urgency to connect with .. what? so many platforms and so many intrusive ads to dodge.
An old lunch friend used to roll his eyes at the table when his device would ring. I have no idea what took him away from me, so many times, but he often said, "this thing owns me."
1
Anyone ever have that dream where your sole purpose is to travel the world and destroy smart phones with a Louisville Slugger?
7
Are you saying it was better without cell phones? What next? No internet? No Facebook? No Twitter? What kind of crazy talk is THAT? Or . . . is it.
7
I too miss the landline, the occasional party line we had with the next door neighbors, the 100 foot cord that seemed to stretch from the avocado green phone on the kitchen wall to every spot in the house. I definitely miss the dial tone. If I was to start an oldies band, I'd call it The Dial-tones.
Also, as kids, we could actually made crank calls to random numbers, knowing we could not be traced back. Classics like asking for Seymour Butts or IP Freeley. Good fun.
May I suggest a rule for the cell phone era? Should a connection drop, the person who initiated the call should be the only one to attempt to call back. This avoids the maddening dual busy signals while both cell users try to start the call anew.
10
I love my landline! When I have to write my phone number I add a parenthetical "landline, don't text." I love the freedom of "I'm not home, leave a message" and I've trained my friends to leave one or I won't know they've called.
I keep the ring very low and glance at the answering machine light when I walk by. If it suits me, I check the roster of callers and delete the robo-calls. I've had my number since 1977.
I use my cell phone only when I'm in my car or out of town.
8
Great article. However, you missed one of the great things about landlines, and that was the party line! You could pick up your phone and listen to other people's conversations. Never mind the little click that would let them know you were on the line. Of course, it worked both ways, as my best friend had a chronic snooper on her line. Now, you don't have to even be sneaky to listen in on all the conversations going on around you! BTW, my best friend and I held up 14 families (4 on my line and 10 on hers) when we talked on the phone.
5
When Hurricane Harvey hit Rockport, TX, the only thing left working was a landline and people lined up to use it.
I have a landline and an answering machine. I use them all the time. I usually only use my cellphone when I travel or to call my carrier when my landline needs repair. Only a few friends and businesses have my cell number but it could be up to 2 weeks before I return those calls. I've only texted once and that was after a car accident, not the cause of one. Somehow, I muddle through.
6
I remember a few years back when my cell phone died while visiting my family at Christmas. At first, I was terrified at getting on the road without my cell phone. Then I remembered how much I had travelled in the past without one, and everything was fine. The change in heart rate and blood pressure were palpable.
And all was fine until...
We stopped for gas and my credit card was denied. It was late at night. I went inside and tried my card again. Denied. I asked to use the landline inside to call the card company and cashier told me "Sorry, our policy is to not allow it. Everyone has a cell phone these days."
I asked the cashier if I could borrow his cell phone. He said, ok. So I used his phone and ended up typing in my credit card number, the security code and my birth date. The representative finally came on the line and said - "Your recent charging behavior resembled fraudulent activity, so we blocked your card, sent you text messages, an email, and called your phone. You didn't respond to anything." I explained the situation and they reactivated my card.
Then I recalled that I had typed all my personal info into the other person's phone. I began to search for call history, when it dawned on me that he might think I was trying to steal his information...
So I gave the phone back, with all my information, and hoped for the best.
All is well. I'm all for your lament, but it seems the world has moved on...
2
What I miss is the superior audio of my former landline.
11
Before we had cable we used the antenna on our roof for our TV viewing. While in college my son told a classmate the we didn't have cable. The student questioned how we watched TV and my son struggled to explain. The kid replied "That doesn't make sense your parents must be stealing cable from someone else." Hahaha. I'd fear the kid would have a stroke to find out about the landlines still in our home.
5
I still have a landline. Better call quality than a mobile. I don't understand people on mobile phones. Not to mention that the buzzing of a mobile phone in my pocket makes me think some cockroach is crawling on me.
11
The landline was a self-powered tool which got us through many disasters. Sandy, Irene, and 9/11 are just three occasions when the only way people could contact us at our home in NYC was over our land line because either we or they had no electricity.
After Sandy we had no cell service for 5 days and couldn't get on the internet through cell service for another 2 days. That's 7 days during which both Mayor Bloomberg and FEMA were telling people, "Why are you bothering us? All you have to do is go to this web site!" I remember listening to a press conference over our battery powered AM radio with Bloomy and the FEMA Regional Director. A woman called who was worried about her parents in Breezy Point; RD told her, "they can go to this web site," she responded, "It's Breezy Point, their house burned to the ground." "Oh," he replied, "then they can call this number." Somewhat exasperated, she said, "They have no cell service," to which he replied, seemingly astonished, "Really??"
Today's landlines are no longer self powered. Blind reliance on new technology is foolish at best. By replacing our land lines we've opened ourselves to mass pandemonium during an attack or natural disaster.
7
Roger Cohen can write so well, I'm over 80 and still use my land phone. My kids laff at me; but the interruptions on my fickle cell phone have made me give it almost up. Who needs it?
1
Thank you for this -- it was soothing to read this column and know that I am not the only oddball who loves the landline. For the last two months I have been fighting to keep it -- and my old rotary phone which functioned perfectly well. Early in November, my city apparently cut the copper line to my house, without notifying me. After unsuccessful attempts to have it restored, I am now forced to switch to a phone service provided via the internet, but that will render my old phone incapable of dialing out.
Even when you do have a semi-stable cell connection, the quality of sound is often atrocious. Just listen to call-ins on radio programs such as On Point, almost all sounding hallowed-out and fading in and out. By contrast, my old phone from 1943 has high quality microphone and speaker, with which no iPhone can begin to compete!
9
You need a landline as a sort of "spam sink." it's the number you give out when you're obligated to provide a phone number to a person or organization you don't want to hear from. Rest assured that they in turn will provide it to hundreds of other people or organizations you don't want to hear from.
4
It is one thing to contemplate the sweet nostalgia of using a landline. It is however unrealistic to not accept and embrace the technologies which have replaced it. That's simply called progress. Those who continue to hold on to their "old" landlines clearly demonstrate that they themselves are indeed "old." For those who choose not to do so, there is a more radical remedy--align yourselves with groups like the Amish, ever reluctant to adopt many conveniences of modern technology. Lol. You can't send those three letters over a landline.
1
Such a wonderful essay!
Us oldies even remember the special hallway niche cabinet-ed into the main hallway to hold the telephone, which sometimes sat on a nice lace doily. Or the specially designed combo chair/side table just for telephoning.
11
And of course there is the first cousin of the landline, the public pay phone.
It was always so pleasant trying to find one in an emergency, hoping that it worked, that one had enough change, that there was not a line for it (queue for you Mr. Cohen) or that it had not been vandalized.
There is still a landline on my desk and at home, but I rarely will answer it.
If somebody wants me, then they know what # to dial and I want to see that I recognize the # or name of the caller.
If my wife did not insist on keeping the landlines, I would throw all out.
2
I am 71 and remember landlines and partylines. I always was a phonephobe I hate phones even the ones where you see the other party. They said I was an old man at seven and just went downhill from there.
It is the holiday season and for us somehow fruitcake is more traditional than latkes. Who ever heard of potatoes before the 16th century.
I know the past , I am a Jew, there were never good old days. We needed hugs and kisses even handshakes to let know we are human. The world is a better place than it has ever been but too many of us are afraid of who knows what.
8
My landline has become the repository of unwanted spam calls (at least 99% of the total at this point.). Pointless but it seems to protect my cell which I never answer if the number is not familiar. I mourn all the loss implied; waiting with sinking hope for the beautiful future this new technology was promised to bring.
2
Thank God for Roger Cohen. What a wonderful reminder - especially now, this time of year, with all the chaos in the world. And I remember party lines. Pick up the receiver and if none of your neighbors was using the line, you could place your call.
2
We had a Star Trek Enterprise space ship phone. When it rang, a light flashed, and it blared the "red alert" sound. After years of "out of this world" conversations, our cat knocked it off its base and it broke. I miss that phone!
7
I like my landline. I had a cell phone a while back. It kept getting calls from people I did not know. It interrupted me when I was with people. It hid in the bottom of my purse ringing insistently so I got rid of it.
If you want me call my landline or send me an e-mail message. I will get back to you on my time.
2
Great piece. I graduated from “university” in 1988. Thank the deities there were no cell phones 1984-88. It would have made my life miserable as people would have been constantly changing plans. Long Live The landline! Call Waiting! Party Line! The Answering Machine!
8
Great piece!
Speaking of 'the commons', I am unfortunately old enough to remember when there was a public phone in your line of sight almost anywhere you went, and a local call cost ten cents - and for that pittance, you could talk all day if you wanted! Really, how much more convenience do you need?
The Bell Telephone Company WAS a commons, a public utility, and it was intended to support convenient and cheap communication within your city. Long distance was another, and very expensive matter. I can remember the rare opportunity I had as a young man to be part of a transatlantic person-to-person telephone call. To make the connection, an operator had to call each of us first, and she addressed us as our countries :
"Great Britain, are you ready?"
"Go ahead, United States!"
Today, that brief call would cost a small fraction of what it did then, but unless my call was to the Queen of England I doubt I would remember much about it.
And other things we have lost - the landline was not dependent on local electric service. You could suffer a power outage and still hear a dial tone, still call for police or an ambulance. And instead of Siri, there were very nice people (real females, not AI imitations) who were always there, any time of day or night, to assist the lost or confused, to connect those who forgot the number. Just dial 'OPERATOR'.
Mr. Cohen's article brought back a lot of memories - I don't think what we've gained is worth a dime compared to what we lost.
9
Please stop this foolish nostalgia. Sure, there are problems with cell phones. Distracted drivers and pedestrians are dangerous. Snooping advertisers can track your location.
Remember the lovely 'ding' as your typewriter reached the end of the line? You then had then chance to feel powerful as you returned the carriage and advanced the platen to the next line.
Remember the elegant skills you developed in rotating the television antenna to improve the reception on the three channels to which you could connect?
Weren't you proud that you could tinker with a balky carburetor to start the car on a winter morning?
I recall my father's proud accomplishment at installing an automatic coal stoker in our home.
Remember the thrills associated with navigating the car with a misfolded road map?
So there are problems with cell phones? Exploit the features you like, and work around the features you don't like.
The world makes progress. Enjoy. The "good old days" are gone. And they weren't all that good, either.
3
Great responses to a fine column. I can't say that my landline is missed because in recent years most of the calls were solicitations or scams. Even with caller id. one must still go to the screen and then disregard the "unavailable" message. The face-to-face social connections and connections with the natural world have diminished with cell phone dependence. I refuse to connect my phone to the internet. I like the large screen on a laptop. When people show me photos on a cell phone screen, it reminds me of the tiny pictures taken with the old Brownie cameras. We've come a long way since then. What's particularly irritating about cell phones is the shared private conversations, usually at high volume, that one is forced to hear in public spaces.
4
Some of this column made me think about a possible column decrying automobiles by fondly remembering your favorite horse.In a good part of the Third World, a cell phone is THE phone. It's too expensive to hard wire a copper connection to every community and then maintain it. That cell network is providing a link to those people that would never be available without cell technology - and that includes internet service. We complain about the end of the land line and copper wire to every home and building, but we also don't want to pay for it either. In terms of service, my sons literally live on opposite sides of the world and the pleasure of a Facetime or Whatsapp video call can't be overstated. I saw Picture Phones at the Worlds Fair in Queens in the 60's and now, cell and internet technology have made that dream common place. I much prefer looking forward.
I am a relatively early adopter of technology but still love my landline. I can’t think of a single friend (we are in our forties) who has a landline anymore. Everyone thinks I’m a Luddite. I do have an iPhone and lots of other technology. But anyone who reads the excellent series (part 2 came out the other day) in the Times about how everyone’s phone is easily tracked should be worried about what they are giving up by using a smartphone. It’s not just your attention span and sanity at risk, but also your privacy and potentially your safety. My next cellphone will be from Punkt. They are from Switzerland - look ‘em up.
1
Call me a Luddite but my landline is still my primary phone line. Yes, I have a cell phone that I carry with me and, yes, it was an asset several weeks ago when I had a flat tire on my way to the gym on a very cold day.
Yes, I do see the usefulness of texting. But most of the day I am turned off so that I can enjoy the view around me, daydream, interact with people in the checkout line and let my thoughts take shape.
7
I still have a landline, due to there being no mobile/cellphone signal where I live. I am writing this on a laptop. Because I am not constantly tethered to my mobile phone at home, I tend to forget about it and often leave home without it. I ALWAYS walk my dogs for an hour or more each day without taking it with me. You know, it is not compulsory to keep looking at your cellphone rather than staring out the window of a train, observing nature as you walk or just lapsing into that dreamy state where ideas and inspirations often just pop up. I have never taken a selfie and never will, and when I go to a concert I don't keep filming it on my phone and I experience it for myself, not others. A cellphone is a great tool, but by making it the only window into our world we become slaves to it. Time to put it back in its place - in your pocket or bag, to be consulted or used only when needed.
8
I have a landline here on my desk in addition to the cell phone on my computer table and, when I'm away from home or my home office, in my pocket.
Of the two, I much prefer the landline as with the help of a 'phone banana' I can rest it comfortably between my shoulder and chin and have my hands free when I'm speaking.
No easier way to take notes while I'm on the phone. And its speaker function is so very much better than the similar but less practical function on my cell phone.
I never have to charge my land line, I don't have to worry about minutes used, and there's no way I would be without it.
4
I still have a landline. It is all I use, after purchsing two cellphones and simply getting mixed up by them, with the enclosed instructions just about big enough for a dwarf gnat to read. Result: I talk to lots of people every day, and see people every day, and don't have to care whether Friend Hepzibah is having sour cream or ketchup on her fritos. I get along just fine. But maybe this is due to the fact that when I was a kid, we didn't get a telephone until I was 15 (1954) and we got along just fine without one. If there was a situation dire enough to warrant a phone call, we went to the corner drugstore and spent a nickel or (later) a dime to contact the person involved. My dad usually called his relatives in Bay Ridge to say he was coming over, but they would have been glad to see him even if totally by surprise. He couldn't call my grandmother, even after we got a phone, because when she died at 80 in the mid-1960s, she'd never had a phone (nor did my maternal grandmother, who died at 84 in 1959). Funny how we just managed to exist as close family units without having to maintain contact on a near minute-by-minute basis throughout our lives. And since I don't own a cellphone now, I am in less danger than my peers of getting run over by a madman whose sole ambition in life is to be the first cyclist champion in Indianapolis.
6
I live in the hills of western Ireland, where it's a miracle to be able to have a conversation on a mobile phone. The mobile can get text messages, or you can wander around the house hoping to find a connection. Very helpful to also keep the land line.
6
Plenty of people still use landlines -- at work! It's not always fun -- that's why they call it "work" -- but it would be far worse to spend your day on a cell phone. Hard to hold, hard to hear, hard to know how long to wait before giving up on a dropped call...
3
Then there is that strange sadness when your 80 or 90+ parent or relative dies and you realize that the land line number they've had for over 50 years is released back to the wild.
218
Oh please. Did my grandmother miss buggy whips? Miss the closeness of that wagon seat? The fresh air, blowing through her hair on the trips to town?
I miss a lot of things from the past- a dial tone isn’t even on that....radar screen.
2
i have a landline with a 1940s phone attached, i rarely answer it because it is usually solicitation. but it is there fpr emergency. Remember the telephone table with chair and shelf for a directory that was the location of the phone: you sat and listened to the call. a time gone by, no one sits anymore to listen to a voice.
6
The landline is not obsolete in my office which is a bedroom converted to a home office. It never will be. When at home I use it almost exclusively. My fax is a landline and my DSL comes through my fax number. My landline has a better quality sound. Both my wife and I prefer our landlines when at home. I don't see the problem with both landlines and cells.
5
We still have a landline, and no cell phone. But the number of spam calls is almost unbearable. It's gotten to the point that I don't answer with a hello, but wait a moment for the party calling to say who is calling. If I don't hear anything for a few seconds, I hang up the phone.
4
Cohen hits on a very significant way cell phones have changed how we relate: the breakdown of our domestic community (family, roommates, etc.) with purely individual phone targeting. Cohen illustrates this much better than I:
"They were, through such random encounters, entwined in the lives of others. My mother might ask afterward, Darling, who’s Caroline?' I could not avoid some response, however evasive."
"The landline was a shared thing. Conversations took place at unplanned moments. Overhearing was unavoidable. I would pull back the net curtain I never liked and gaze out on suburban nothingness. I could not take the call to my room."
"Franklin recalled being mortified at her mother answering when a boyfriend called on the family landline. 'Still, at least then you had some idea who your children were seeing. Cellphones put an end to that.'”
"In the landline world there was down time. You left the house, you looked around, you saw people, you daydreamed, you got lost, you found your way again, you gazed from the train window at lines of poplars swaying in the mist. Time drifted. It was not raw material for the extraction of productivity."
"Experience occurred, not as a thing to be rated with stars, nor as the prelude to a request for feedback. Sidewalks were not an obstacle course around people absorbed by smartphones.... Heads were not bowed in contemplation of thumbs. The end of landlines has been bad for necks. It has been bad for the bonds that form the commons."
5
As always, Roger is more than a columnist, he’s a philosopher-poet.
Landlines made me learn a little Spanish better than any classroom. My Cuban girlfriend’s grandmother spoke no English and always answered the phone. “Podria hablar con Maria, por favor?” And each week I had to learn more phrases as she engaged me with pleasantries.
I remember the thrill as a teenager when the phone would ring and I would beat my brother to answer it hoping to hear from an earlier girlfriend confirming a date. Alas it was for him and I’d hand over the phone and sit at the kitchen table glaring at him so he’d end the call quickly.
Landlines were at once instruments that limited family secrets, yet at the same time so much more intimate and private than today’s social media filled smart phones.
And yes, as Roger notes, an appointment made on a landline, even days in advance, was kept.
As you are so right, minds were forced to remain sharper pre-smartphones, too. We memorized dozens of phone numbers. We did math in our heads. And we knew where we were on our virtual maps in our heads. We got places just fine, and on time, without Google.
5
I, too, use a landline. Okay, part of an XFinity triple play of tel w/answering machine, PC and small TV on my large desk. Much easier handling and voice quality. My friends and family know to call me on that home phone, as I'm almost always home (I'm retired) and will respond immediately.
I also have an iPhone (6S+) that I bought a few years ago to replace an old flip phone. I quickly disabled the email function. Since I'm retired and home most of the time, I get my email and Web surfing via my 27" all-in-one PC. I also do some fiction writing (not tried to publish them) and in an email roundelay with friends about politics, nature, science, the world.
Lest you think I'm retro about tech, I have a superior A/V system with LG OLED 65" 4K TV, excellent companion components and 5.1 speaker surround system. And, best of all, a ROKU Ultra streaming device through which I watch copious Netflix programs, and listen to streaming SiriusXM music. All wired with ethernet - much more stable and secure than WiFi.
My iPhone is relegated to the car when I'm riding (for emergency uses) and occasionally carried when meeting friends in case we're running a little late.
Oops, hang on, my phone's ringing...
1
We replaced the old POTS phone with an internet phone, Voice Over IP, and it works just fine. My wife doesn't have a cell phone. I guess there's no reminiscing about the good old days for us.
I am 75 years old, I refuse to give up my land line. Yes, I have a cell but its a ten year old flip phone that I just use for talking nothing else. Living in rural Montana a cell phone is a must because getting stuck in the boonies could be very dangerous. To be honest I really miss my bag phone, it was very powerful and you could be 50 miles from a town but still make a call. I find it amazing that people's life's revolve around looking at a little plastic screen. So sad, no wonder there is so much loneliness no one looks at one another anymore. As a teen I would use the public phone outside my house so I could talk to my girlfriends in private. Now there are no more public phones anywhere. Maybe airports, they cost much more than a dime now.
4
Oh, the moment I knew I was entering adulthood and could call my boyfriend on our shiny, new harvest gold landline phone.
I demanded privacy as we cooed to each other and talked over the day's highlights and lowlights. There was that longing "goodbye" near the end and each of us refusing to hang the phone up.
How idyllic that time was. How free from "Can you hear me now?" hiccups and hang-ups.
Please, Sir, may I have my rotary landline phone back?
2
Interesting commentary and comments.
For me, it started with the big wooden box on the wall with a hand piece and speaker. You had a crank that would ring everybody on the party line with a long and short ring.
This was followed with the party line with a dial rotary phone. Anybody could pick up their phone and listen in.
Today we have multiple cordless phones that are a huge part of our business. Cell phones have become very important, they give is much better opportunity to connect both in business and family.
But for working men and women, it can be a better part of valor to leave the phone in the pickup rather than drop it in a puddle, pore of wet concrete or smashed by machinery. Besides in noisy situations, you can't hear the ring anyway.
1
Mr. Cohen,
Good piece, thank you. I also remember whenever I moved having to turn my phone in and then renting another one from ATT in the new city. Hard to even explain that to my son.
One question, though - why is there a huge squash on the table with the phone?
2
As I sit here, my landline is in plain sight on the table beside me. My husband, always lamenting, “why are we paying for that thing, we both have cellphones!”
I love technology, and have never shied away from incorporating in to my daily life but I don't want it controlling me. When I see someone on their cellphone texting or talking while driving, I wonder, “when did it become so important to connect with someone or something that you could endanger lives?”
My land line reminds me of the importance of being in contact with someone, that is it's sole purpose, no bells, no whistles, just the means to connect. The dial tone defines that, a single sound sent out to a single person, the landline stays!
2
Never gave up my landline although I do have an iPhone. Also I am still using a Princess phone as an extension to the more modern portable wireless phones. When asked for a phone number I also only divulge my landline number. My iPhone is for emergency calls when I am away from home. I play no games on it. Unfortunately I need it to adjust my hearing aides which is its most common use, and a great improvement over the small switch which is prevalent on hearing aids. Viva the landline!
1
One thing I don't miss is being aware - all the time I was conversing - of the cost of minutes and "out of area" charges. Today we don't think about the whopping cost of cable - and cellular for our mobile phones - until those big bills come in. Those "unlimited calls within the continental U.S." don't come cheap.
1
Great piece of memorabilia. I still remember the party line in my folks' old Bronx apartment, when the number was FOrdham 5 - something. I still have a landline, plus a cell phone, of course. And my old rotary phone sits unplugged on my computer desk, a living memory.
1
When I was a child there was no dial on the phone and the operator said "number please." When we had a party line I would listen to other people's conversations when I had nothing else to do.
Long distance was expensive then and everyone talked loud thinking that was the only way they could be heard. It was a big deal to talk long distance and I remember, "Quiet, she's on long distance".
The heavy old phones created drama. You could slam down the receiver, and I remember my father being so mad one time he yanked the wire out of the wall. High drama.
I've had a cell phone for about ten years and I strictly use it for calls. I don't text or do anything else with my phone. That's what my laptop is for.
When I go anywhere where I will have to wait I always have my current book with me. Everyone else is bent over their phone, and if they notice me at all, they look at me like I'm nuts. They have no idea that they look nuts to me.
9
@Carole A. Dunn From when there was no dial on the phone ?! That was way, way back...even in the Hitchcock movies, at least in Dial M for ..., which was way before my time, there was dial on the phone.
You have certainly lived history. And there is probably something to learn when you say 'they look nuts to me'.
4
The great thing about a cellphone is that one doesn't actually have to use the phone, to answer or call. As one who has never liked the phone, it's a relief to just text people or email. Navigation, texting, and a camera is a huge improvement over a landline. And until recently, our cells freed us from landline sales calls, usually at dinnertime. Now with SPAM calls, many of us just never answer unidentified numbers. Good riddance to phones.
1
I don't understand the fuss. I'm an old guy and the landline is all I know. It suits me just fine.
5
I miss sitting in the kitchen and twirling the cord around my finger endlessly that was attached to the wall phone.
I do not miss my father hanging up on my high school boyfriend who would call and politely say, "Hello, Mr. Wasserman. May I please speak with Joanne" and the yelling that came afterwards about how I was too young to have a boyfriend.
I miss calling and the phone ringing and waiting to see if someone picked it up. If not, you knew that you "had to call back later".
I miss busy signals, knowing someone was home and on the phone and if I kept dialing, I would "get through".
I use my old landline telephone (At&T circa 1981, red plastic push button boxy style phone) as a doorstop.
84
The irony is that I would have missed Roger’s wonderful column if not for the device I read it on.
5
Dear Roger Cohen: Just look at what your column inspired! Thank you ever so much "for the memories" (as an old song did)! ~ 80 years young, when reading this column!
2
I fear for the future. Every single tween girl I se in my neighborhood is ALWAYS glued to their phone screen. What kind of brain is developing this way? Not a good one I fear judging by the way they can almost step on my dog and keep walking without a word
5
excellent column. Something not mentioned is that so many movie and TV plots existed because of the landline. Potential lovers missed connecting as they were delayed and the early one walked away sad. The good guy(I just saw a Magnum rerun) had to keep a corded phone line open and talking while shooting and dodging bullets. Many other examples but long gone. I find myself in so many garbage conversations just bored when driving which are fun but mentally draining.
1
@Arthur Dial M for Murder, for one.
1
Your right! Looking back at the good feelings of past values. Problem is you sound like a conservative to capture a long gone era.
Are you bailing out on your liberal progressive movement?
I agree in so many ways, and yet when I was a teenager in the mid 80's and started earning my own money, I went out and bought a trimline phone with a 50 foot cord and a jack splitter, so I could talk with friends in the privacy of my own room.
2
I myself remember how, before cellphones, the world seemed limitless. I remember wandering around the country, stunned by the scenery, lost not in myself but in...I guess some kind of promise. Roger Cohen, you are a poet, and the sentence about the poplars alone will bang around in my head all day.
2
The era flashes before my eyes. 676-J , our party line. Free Directory Assistance. In-state long distance calls (eg, 30 miles) were more expensive than out of state (40 miles). My best friend's 1920s two piece phone, the one that zapped Oliver Hardy with a stream of water from the speaker stand. "Number please". San Francisco: 415, not 415, 510, 628, 650. No phone jack: you cut the cord to give "the instrument" back to Ma Bell. "Tell him..." : no answering machines. "Put your man on the phone; no, you put your man on the phone"---secretary confrontation. Any color you wanted as long as it was black. But then! Tomato soup red! Does Clark Kent still use phone booths?
2
I wonder how many young people would be willing to give up the things they treasure now in order to live in the landline world?
2
@Stephen Merritt I agree, none.
We have both lost and gained. There also use to be switchboard operators and party lines. Someone to talk to and whom you probably knew. Technology is good AND bad at the same time. Enjoyable to read this commentary - Thank you.
1
It used to be that if you saw someone walking down the street gesticulating and talking loudly, you assumed that they were hearing non-existent voices.
This is still occurring, but there is no way to know if that person screaming walking down the street is wearing communicating with invisible forces or if...wait -- come to think of it, even if they are on their cell phone, they are communicating with invisible forces.
I have both a landline and a cell phone, for different reasons. Kind of like those soldiers who wore a St. Christopher's medal, a cross, and a mezuzah around the neck for extra protection, just in case.
2
This article was so beautifully written, so nostalgic, it made me smile from my belly button up! The emotional memories tied to the ringing of your land line are so apt. I remember moving to NYC from Cleveland (dont be jealous) and waiting for my land line to ring...just so I knew I was not alone in the Big city. Keeping appointments and having time in between our calls allowed us to use our imaginations and observe those around us. We also had a party line in our old Maine summer house. Now that was a community! Bravo Roger for this gorgeous article!!! happy Holidays!! RING RING RING!
2
The difference between people living in the same house and living together in the same house.
1
My wife is the delegated steward of the smart phone. The ringer is turned off. She only texts. I never hear an unwanted ring to disturb the tranquility at home.
As her chauffeur, i'm required to pick her up promptly, but not carrying a phone myself if the schedule is altered she has to wait. Ambrose Bierce would be proud.
1
For the life of me I can't understand the grief and skepticism that the idea of keeping a Landline engenders from everyone, having one seems to be the equivilant of tatooing AARP onto your forehead. When I call someone on my Landline, I'm not using up the battery on my cell phone unnecessarily, when talking to friends if they sound like they're underwater and are barely intelligible, or if the connection starts to get lost, I can safely say, "It's not me, I'm on a Landline, it must be on your end." The only obvious downside is the additional monthly cost and the incessant Telemarketing Calls, to paraphrase Charlton Heston, "You can have my Landline when you can pry it from my cold dead hands."
5
What a beautiful essay!
And worth adding that in the great Northeast black out of 2003 the landlines worked when cellphones could not (at least, landlines not connected to a charger cradle).
I still have a landline. It is my main phone. I have a burner phone in the glove box of my car for emergencies. It can go days without being turned on.
What I miss is the days when you would make plans with people and they would actually follow through. Now if you make plans for say dinner at 5 - no one will show up at 5, people will text or call at 5:15 to say they are running late or are not coming. Cell phones have normalized rude behavior.
5
At the age of 75 I am somewhat of a Luddite insofar as I constantly use my landline even though my arm was twisted to purchase a cell about 15 years ago and rather quickly discovered that for me personally cell phone use is entirely too disruptive and unnecessary. I cycle a great deal in warm weather and while doing so the last thing I want is to talk on the phone, any phone. The same holds true for walking. Before anyone starts to think that I am a fossil I must tell you that I am very adept at using my laptop computer.
4
We have a landline. It rings a lot -- with dozens of robocalls a day. You Mail doesn't work on landlines but my answering machine does - we mute the ringtone on numbers we don't recognize. If they are real they leave messages. It never loses its charge.
1
One thing that is much better about a landline, particularly if two are connected, is the quality of the audio. Many people don't realize how bad cell phone connections often are in comparison.
Ma Bell spent lots and lots of effort back in the day working on the quality of the connection and audio. Much of that was let go with cell phones.
9
Landlines were great in the business world because it meant that when you went out to see a customer, other customers or people back at the office couldn't get hold of you for some trivial thing that could wait until you returned. It meant that lunch could be uninterrupted as could your drive home from work as well as your drive to work in the a.m. It gave you some time to yourself, to think, to relax. It gave you time to run over a presentation in your head while riding the train to your customer without having your thoughts interrupted by text messages, phone calls, or news updates that kept "binging" that they'd just breathlessly arrived.
Yes, the cell phone is wonderful on many levels. If running late due to traffic etc. you can call ahead. You can let your family know if something is delaying your commute from work and it does give the "comfort" of knowing constant contact is available BUT for all that we've gained, we've also lost some things too.
4
Wow. We used to have that exact type of phone in my 1950s childhood home. I can feel the smooth yet somehow oily texture of the Bakelite. The way that the slightly rough edges on the the inside of the dial holes could catch in a fingernail. The way the speaking bit always seemed a bit unhygienic.
And, that 'Call Exchange' button usually worked. A childhood game was to see whther pressing it went unnoticed or whether the sharp, admonitory voice of the operator (always female) crackled from the receiver.
'How did you manage?' ask my kids incredulously. No cellphones, no internet, no PC. Stamps, envelopes, the radio (aka 'the wireless' in England), diaires, notebooks, slide rules, newspapers and magazines, buses - not Uber; patience and good manners. Somehow, life DID work.
5
I love my VOIP land lines. I have four land-line phones in my residence. My old "slide" cell phone is with me only when I'm away from home, and I don't text or accept texts. I'm holding on to my sanity as long as possible but I can't promise I'll win this battle. Maybe, just maybe I'll transition to a smart phone when I'm in assisted living.
4
@Gregory Eaglin No, no, do it now. Its a wonderful and different world ... enjoy that much before you are 'forced' to go for it.
Beautiful essay that took me back to when voices sounded real, with startling analog clarity and presence. I had forgotten that clarity until an English friend who is an engineer asked if he could call me from Britain on the landline he knew was still connected at my house. He insisted analog tech was far better for long distance calls, so I dug up my vintage black Bell Telephone model 2500 with the pushbuttons to use instead of the digital wireless phone we had connected. The call was startling, like I was talking to my childhood friend down the block.
The mention of answering machines recalls when my dad brought home a massive box that was one of the first Phone-Mate answering machines in the early 70s. We were such young kids that we didn’t quite understand the implications of the mysterious thing. Then my great aunt, who was my mother’s favorite, died. It was a sudden death and mom deeply mourned the missed opportunity to say goodbye. She jumped on a plane immediately to return to Mexico for the funeral but didn’t review and erase the several days’ worth of messages on the Phone-Mate before leaving. When she returned and began reviewing them, she suddenly let out a howl of grief that brought me running. There she was crying and replaying over and over the last message my aunt left the day before she died. Suddenly, I understood what that box could mean to those of us still living.
6
I still have one, and I will fight for it until the end. (Verizon has decided to limit maintenance to get me to give up.) When your cell phone won't work, mine still does. Also, it doesn't follow me wherever I go.
2
Well, we still have ours, even though I converted it to VOIP in 2004 when Vonage was starting to become a big thing. Can't beat it for stability and usually the quality of calls. Quite often my mother-in-law in South Carolina will tell us we sound like we're right in the room with her. Can't do that on a cell phone. Indeed, given the overall crappy nature of cell calls, I'm amazed the technology really took off. We made the perhaps not altogether wise choice of combining both "convenience" with mediocrity. Turns out it was a rabbit hole we all got sucked into, and I doubt if we can ever go back again. Still, something to be said for simplicity. At least there are those of us who can appreciate the now "classic" phones found in older movies and TV shows. They may seem quaint now, but in another twenty or so years and going on into the future for the next generations? Probably incomprehensible.
4
@Patrick
“We made the perhaps not altogether wise choice of combining both ‘convenience’ with mediocrity.”
I can not think of a more appropriate and profound epitaph for America.
6
Oh yes dear, I remember nostalgia, we used to have a lot of that back when.
1
I have been talking to my daughter about landlines because we do not believe in giving a child a smartphone till they are at least teen agers. My point with her is, my generation always had access to a phone, our home phone and we could call friends etc. This has been my argument to at least let her 11 yr old daughter at least have a flip phone. I finally won this year mostly because her parents are getting divorced and her mom needs to be able to get a hold of her on school days. Now she can call me without having to borrow her parents phones !!
OK, Boomers, get a grip. I'm almost 60. I don't have a landline, but I stopped having it when I lived overseas for 9 years (2005-2014). I don't memorize phone numbers anymore. I do study Google maps if I'm going somewhere, so I have a good lay of the land before I arrive. Once there, I rarely need to ask directions or figure out where to go, did that ahead of time! I will sometimes buy a paper map, but mostly to locate cultural sites, not to find my way around town. And the ringer on my cell is almost ALWAYS off. I turn it on when expecting a call (yesterday the vet clinic was going to call when my pet's surgery was done). If I don't recognize the number of an inbound call, I don't answer unless I'm expecting a call. 99% of my missed calls are robocalls and telemarketing. You want to talk? Text me that I should call and I will. No Facebook, no Instagram, no Twitter.
My point is, you can manage today's technology to suit your habits , wants and needs if you try. You don't have to succumb to all its downsides if you don't want to.
4
As a Charter Member of the Type A Society it still amazes me that I don't own a cell phone. One of my fondest memories is of an early trip to Paris. I was on a street corner with a map in one hand and was scratching my head with the other. An elegantly dressed lady - perhaps wearing Ysatis by Givenchy - asked me if she could help. I mentioned the museum I was looking for. She pointed it out and told me that I had made an excellent choice. She waved goodbye and walked off with her poodle in toe.
6
We still have a working rotary dial phone in our kitchen. When our children were younger (and before cellphones were ubiquitous), we enjoyed telling their friends to use the kitchen phone to call for a pickup from their parents. Typical responses -- "Do you have any other phones" and trying to use the rotary dial by just putting their finger in the hole and 'pushing' the number.
5
I love this article. I still maintain a landline for my work (home office) because the last thing I want is a client texting me while I'm out walking my dog. It's a treasured moment away from my desk. And 100% tax-deductible!
2
I keep thinking that life would be sooooo much better if Twitter would disappear - no raving lunatic from the Oval Office running the country via stupid tweets, he would actually have to focus on running the country without the media hanging on every dumb thought and misspellings. What a world.
4
No more staying out to the wee hours, finally coming home, and contritely lying, "The car broke down."
6
I have read a large number of comments and come to the following conclusion:
Either the only people who follow Roger Cohen are at least 80% some kind of 21st century luddites or the New York Times comment review system is rejecting submissions from those who do not miss the landline.
This short comment is a rewrite of a longer one that got the now familiar error message blocking submission.
I do not miss the landline even if as an 87 year old who grew up in America remember the black dial telephone very well.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Citizen US SE
3
For the guitar players, the landline could be used as a tuner because the dial tone was an F.
121
@Bucketomeat I thought the dial tone was a combination of two different frequencies.
3
@Bucketomeat
It was also used as a clock by dialing (in L.A.) 853-1212: “At the tone the time will be...”
Funny, that phone number has been dead for many years now, yet I remember it better than of the current phone numbers of my family and friends.
31
Oh my, those memories. Dial 0, a real voice answers with, please, what city? Los Angeles, party is John Smith, Wilshire Blvd. Thank you, just a monent....your party is on the line. Than you operater.
Miss those days for sure.
4
Ans you did not have unwanted robo calls,, or calls with someone speaking Chinese.
2
Amen, brother.
2
Yeah, yeah, yeah!
There was ‘party line’ through which the mischievous could clandestinely listen to the other party.
If you wanted to make on the party line you had to wait for the other person to finish...
You had switchboard operators who would listen in on calls...
Making a long distance call was a tedious ritual. You called the operator, gave details of the person you wanted to call, more details if your wish to reverse charges...
If the party you tried through the Operator was not available you tried later...Rinse, Repeat...
If you had an unfamiliar name you had to spell like you see in war movies - ‘Sierra, Romeo, India, November, India...”
You miss all that Roger?
1
Thirty five year old millennial here. I installed a land line when I moved into an apartment, after moving out of my parents' house, since I am a stereotype. During days off from work, and vacation, my cell phone goes on a counter, with only the ringer on. I highly recommend it to other members of my generation, and younger, as a remedy for burn out.
4
One comment that hit me was about slamming the phone down. My ex would get drunk and call up and rant. After I few minutes I would say, "I don' have to put up with this XXXX any more" and slam it down.
2
I have a cell phone. I mainly use it when I'm away from the house. At home I use my landline phones (in several locations around the house). I view phones as appliances. I use them when and how I wish.
1
Thank you Roger! You’ve reminded me of Marshall McLuhan’s powerful observation that “the medium is the message.” Personally I refuse to allow the precious days of my life to be sucked into what I see as the billionaires’ vortex. My landline is still my only phone. I have had cellphones during periods when my work has made them necessary but I stop their use completely when not necessary. I carry an iPad with inexpensive prepaid cell service and keep a small balance on skype to make a call if it’s really necessary. This way I can enjoy my life without interruption. Out in the world I have exchanges with people more often (ones without plugs in their ears), take in the skies and the life going on around me, and have daydreams. I do email but I don’t text because I prefer to speak to people on the phone. I can tell from a friend’s voice how they’re really doing, which, among other things, enables me to be a better friend.
4
I have no love for my cell phone or cellphone conversations. I spend entirely too much time trying to get the damn Bluetooth to connect. I can't get it out of my purse in time to answer it. Often there is a bad connection. In short, the service is poor and the cost is ridiculous. I could have a real emergency and my son will have turned off his phone for the night. Someone at home always answers a landline and the reception is good. No one I knew spent $100s on a bill much less a grand for a phone. I don't think cells make an improvement in my life.
6
We live in very fringe cell phone area in southwest Washington state. Very frustrating.
When we bought the house 6 years ago there were, and still are, phone jacks in various areas. Our crappy cell phone reception solution? Back to the land line.
Growing up in Orange county NY in the 1950's our phone had a double ring. A single ring was for a neighbor. It was a 10 party line. Ah....progress....
1
why is there a gourd on your table. is it required to operate the telephone.
3
When I think of landline I think of growing up in the 50's and 60's, living in Lynbrook with 6 kids and four adults and the ringing of the phone being part of the background noise of the house. I picture my teenage sister in curlers talking endlessly to her friends and the perpetually twisted up phone cord. Getting a phone call from a girl for my brother, "Ooh, who's that?" and the whole family watching and listening, him red faced. Zero privacy. Even when my parents put an extension in their room, someone was always picking up the other phone. And does anyone even remember party lines?
2
Ahh the sound of the handset clunking on your skull as you raced to grab the phone! We all knew the phone was an appropriate choice of weapon when the film noir hero needed to knock someone out....and let us never forget the mischief unattended children could manage on a shared party line.
3
Take back power over your life. Ditch the cell phone and go landline. My husband and I have never owned a cell phone, never want one. Unnecessary. Did fine before cell phones were invented. Stop whining. Start singing, "Got along before we met you, gonna get along without you now."
2
I don't own a cellphone and never will — don't need one. Please call me at home on my landline phone. If I don't pick up, leave a message and I'll call you back.
5
For goodness' sake Roger get yourself an ooma and you'll have a landline again at 1/10th the price.
1
Oooohhhh no, the landline. The sound of that screeching ring. My mother picking up the receiver, suspicious of my father's whereabouts. Other calls made soon after, in whispered tones.
Then my parents inevitable knock-down-drag-out fight that would leave me cowering and quaking. The horror almost always started with the landline with the shrill, tinny bells of the landline's ring.
The phone and its ring is still a thing of trauma to me. I call it my "psych phone baggage." So no, I don't miss the landline. I couldn't get rid of it fast enough.
This column is beautiful. But instead of wistful nostalgia, it takes me right back, with a shiver, to that dreaded ring and a little girl left cowering in the corner.
43
@LindaP
Gosh Linda, that's a powerful post. I certainly remember from my (1950s childhood) landline days that incoming calls on the home phone were usually bad, rather than good, news. People were more verbally continent back then. Good tidings waited until you were face to face. And, people used to WRITE to each other. Heavens. How DID we manage?
26
@LindaP
Thanks for your comment.
You are pointing out that the relatively public nature of the landline can have its downsides.
By the same token, though, the more private natures of the cellphone and internet can have their own downsides.
Maybe it's best to try, as best as possible, to line up our public and private selves (and cells).
I hear you saying that you had collateral damage from the landline publicity. Would it have made a difference if your dad and mom were glued to secret cell phones? A hypothetical, I know, but one possibly worth considering. Can the form of media change human failings?
Maybe. Facilitated by the internet, we see porn out in the open so much today, which probably isn't particularly good beyond signalling what has already long been signalled -- vague doubts about Puritanism.
I do think the media of communication can make differences in our lives, and not all bad. This comment board is a witness to enhanced connectivity.
It enabled you to share.
Thank you again.
14
I still have a landline. The only people who have my mobile number are my children and wife. If anyone else needs to get in touch with me while I am out, I'd rather they leave a message on my home phone rather than reaching me while I am walking or riding.
4
In the 1980’s I worked as a telephone services technician for Bell of Pennsylvania, my first real job. Despite the popular culture portrayal of a giant uncaring impersonal monopoly, we were always focused on serving the customer, I never left a home or business without getting the phone to work or calling in reinforcements when the trouble was too much for me to fix on my own. Usually we had the problem resolved within a few hours, the same day or sometimes the next.
I climbed telephone poles using climbing hooks strapped to my legs, worked in subzero temperatures, howling winds, waist deep snow, and pouring rain, and loved every minute of it. It was a real culture of service.
Today there is so little emphasis on service or loyalty from companies to customers and employees. We thought it was bad back then, but it was a bit of a golden age compared to today’s increasingly impersonal world.
9
@Mike Jacobs
Believe it or not, there is still a “landline division” at AT&T that reflects that culture.
After my divorce, I moved back into the large home of my aging parents to help them out. When the landline went on the fritz intermittently for months, the AT&T call center insisted the problem was our internal lines and not theirs. Of course, I’d already evaluated the tech and knew the problem was beyond the property line. I demanded management and my call was escalated and misdirected four times before I reached landline Nirvana where customer service is still at the old Bell standards.
A special tech was dispatched who upon arrival said, “oh, I know this home. It’s one of the last in the area that still has an original [circa 1962] Western Electric junction box”. Turns out he’s a landline technician who’s been working for Pacific Bell in our neighborhood (and later AT&T after it was acquired) since his youth in the ‘80s. He was wonderful and indeed traced the problem to a short in the phone cabling several blocks away. He was also able to get us a $300 phone bill credit for the many months of spotty service.
Afterwards, he gave me the direct phone number to the local landline workshop saying, “Next time, don’t bother calling AT&T. Just call us directly.”
1
I feel wonderful knowing that I’m still using my Verizon landline to interact with relatives and friends and businesses on a daily basis. My service is dependable and I never worry about its availability. My cell phone (flip version) is only charged for use when traveling. I still have a wall mounted rotary phone in my basement that always initiates a conversation when maintenance people come for winter (heat) and summer (ac) services.
2
We had a party line in our Los Angeles neighborhood, fifteen people all told including the kids. One six year old monopolized the line! 52014 was our number. My sister would drag the black phone into the hall closet (not that long a cord) to talk privately behind coats and umbrellas. Some of my best math was remembering numerous phone numbers of friends. Recently someone said he tried to explain to his fourteen year old grand daughter what a telephone book was. That cradled black phone in the inset curved nook of the old Spanish house still rings as close to sacred
7
Roger, my family used to have a party line. And we also had nosy neighbors who listened in on our conversations. That said, however, I still have a landline phone and use it most of the time. The cell is only for an occasional call related to my work. I think it is sad to walk in the park and see people disconnected (pardon the pun) from nature. Birds are singing, ducks are swimming, but many people are oblivious to them. And it is not just teens who are addicted to these devices. Most of those I see in the park are adults.
6
My landline allows me to shut off my smartphone, move to a quiet space and spend time with myself. It is there where I restore my sense of balance and sanity. No Alexa, no alerts, no text messages, no ads, just quiet. When I'm ready I go check my message machine to see if anyone has tried to call without being distracted by the other things on my cell phone screen. I wouldn't have it any other way.
1
There is more to it than this. Delay on a cell phone causes a totally different conversation, shorter sentences, a feeling of being talked over causing a more hostile discussion and a much shorter conversation. My team and I researched this at a major telecommunications equipment company, by asking volunteers to have a conversation and then cranking up the delay. The results were sudden and consistent. Cell phone calls are far less personal, less friendly and less intimate.
FYI: cell phone technology needs to introduce delay in order to compress the information into the capacity available. It is not just a network delay issue.
2
hmmm
seems like just another "buggy-whip" to hang up forever in the barn.
my grandchildren know absolutely nothing about 'land-lines'.
time inexorably moves along, with or without us, for the common-good or not.
i DO miss those western electric bakelite phones that could survive almost any disaster and still "connect" to the 'service' - - even, once-upon-a-yesteryear, to an "operator".
sigh
A great read. We now have lived through almost three decades of cell phones and my chief take away from all of this is that people just talk too much now. And too much of anything demeans its value. When you see people in their cars screaming at no one in particular, you know we've gone too far. In the days of the land line when you could only respond when home, you said what you needed to and moved on. Talk less and mean more - impossible today with everyone constantly connected.
And don’t forget that landlines provide the exact and accurate location to 911. This is why I insisted that my mother get a landline, in addition to her iPhone.
Phones, carriers and dispatch centers must, all three, have the latest software and hardware for the just-coming-online location pinpointing to work. This is usually not the case in urban areas. If one of the three is missing then they may not be able to locate the patient if they themselves cannot say their location.
I would get a landline again if Congress would do something so that it is not a constant spam callfest.
It’s going to be tough, because we are all addicted, but the solution is to leave your phone at home. We used to live like that so it IS doable. Would it it be freeing?
1
Our phone number exchange was UN, for university, which I found odd because the campus was on the opposite side of the city. My girlfriend was DA 8-8869; her apartment was just off Davis Street. When we wanted to talk discreetly, I would walk two blocks to the nearest phone booth, which stood alone at the edge of an large vacant field, illuminated from within at night as if in an Edward Hopper painting. One dime for unlimited time, with no low battery concerns. And talk for hours we did.
If I was downtown, I would head to Woolworth's and ensconce myself in one of their oak phone booths, each with a telephone directory, a seat and a fan that turned on when you closed the door. The reception there was always perfect.
3
I have news! It is still a choice. I have a land line and rarely use my flip cell phone except to coordinate when meeting someone at an airport or station. I choose not to be disturbed when I am enjoying a walk, reading a book etc. What disturbs me as a pediatrician is to see mothers in the playground (OK sometimes fathers) pushing their child on a swing with one hand and the other holding their smart phone in which they are engrossed. No communication with the child. Get a grip..you still have choices in life.
4
I remember a college roommate standing on top of and grinding his shoes into our BellSouth telephone, just to demonstrate how indestructible the things were.
1
I recall in my three decades as a New Yorker that the landline died, at least in the West Village, from Verizon's neglect to maintain the old lines with the unstated, but obvious, goal of obsolescence through neglect. Let the old system rot away while the new system of microwave towers and cellphones was looking for traction. Profit in innovation led the way. I gave up on my landline because scheduling repairs was a huge hassle, with weeks of waiting climaxed by the appearance of a surly, taciturn repairman who could never quite fix my problem. We literally had no choice but to go with the infinitely inferior, and more expensive, new cellphone revolution.
2
I still have my landline and prefer to get my calls on it. My cell phone is there with me when I am out, to seek help, in case of an emergency.
2
Lucky me. I still have a landline and hardly ever use my cellphone when at home.
Only when driving do I take my cell phone with me in order to be able to call someone should I have a flat, or call people I am supposed to meet, docs, friends, should I run late.
Yet, whatever I do, my phone stays in the car.
4
Dear Roger,
Thank you for a lovely essay. We still have a landline in our home & it is still the center of a spider's web of contacts -in part because we sit in one of the last corners of our island in which cell phones don't work. When my parents bought their house in California phone numbers still began with "letters" that one knew through words "841...' became 'THornwall 1..." for more than fifty years as friends came & went, families moved or died out, my parent's number remained a constant -not just in our lives but in our friends' lives, my father's students lives... I doubt that many cell numbers will last as long.
1
My Dad's 1943 Model 302 is on my desk. Though I'm not as old, I can imagine the sound of its ring, that is if I had a landline. Several mentioned the awkward design of cell phones; here is a shout-out to engineer George Lum and designer Henry Dreyfuss for designing phones of the 1930s through the 50s which were actually comfortable. A detail in the photo caught my eye as the cord of the apparently English phone is on the right. I'm a mixture of left-handed and right-handed, and it seems to me most American phones had cords on the left. I'd have always tangled up the one shown!
I still remember my mother marching up with her sewing shears and cutting the phone cord when my teenage sister would not get off the phone during the dinner hour.
2
In my almost drab daily life, a ring on this old phone is joy only a robo call can disrupt. Neither my wife nor I will lower our standards and go 'smart' -- being content with a flip phone for emergencies. When we actually need Wiki or Google, they are there along with 'everything', a mere laptop away.
But to have to go out and wade through that sea of eyes-glued-to-the-tiny-screen only affirms "Never, even if they make us".
6
We still have two landlines for the house and shop...we have no cell phone service up on the mountain, hard by the Appalachian trail, on the Tennessee/North Carolina State Line. I tip my phone technician very well every time I see him.
Landline service is far from dead. According to the most recent report by the U.S. Center for Disease Control National Health Information Survey (NHIS), about 42.8% of American households still use a landline phone as of December 2017.
4
I have comcast phone service which is landline-like when it's working. And I have a cell phone for family, emergencies and grocery lists. I used to take my cell when I took my dog for walks three or four times a day and I kept it charged, but now that he's gone I put my phone in my purse when I go out and frequently forget about it. In fact it's currently sitting on the counter, plugged in to the power outlet with a black screen... there was no comforting tingle when I plugged it in so fingers crossed that it lives again one day.
I don't think it's simple nostalgia to miss your landline. That system just really worked!
We were connected but not intrusively so. We certainly didn't sleep with it.
We paid ONE PHONE BILL per month, not one for each member of the household... omg the costs of these things for a large family!!
We weren't expected to maintain it or replace it every couple of years. The landline phones lasted a decade or more. OK youth; climate concern here.
We weren't expected to google-solve our own repairs. I miss the customer service of my telephone company (Bell Canada). And, especially, the house calls where they'd come to you to fix equipment or wiring problems.
And I do really miss the social behaviours of landline days. You were taught how to use your voice alone, to properly address a caller, to speak, employ etiquette and diplomacy to handle a range of caller situations.
The shift from landlines to cellphones has also caused me to miss asking people for directions, or the time, or for simple how-to advice. Ok boomer... it's called Google. Yes, I know... but can't you just lift your arm and point the direction?
6
The land line is not lost - just incredibly expensive. We pay upwards of $80 per month for our land line, but we keep it because it's more likely than our cell phones to function during a disaster. I gave up Starbuck's coffee to keep my land line. Well worth it!
7
Cell phones may be the most intrusive example, but this is all part of a rapidly accelerating process in which the primacy of our relationship to other people and ourselves has been shifted to our relationship with technology.
Absorption in a cell phone in public rather than talking to strangers. Texting while out to dinner with friends. Driving rather than walking where human contact or -- horrors -- immersion in our own thought process could occur. Using GPS rather than memory, maps or asking directions to navigate a city (it took my much younger boyfriend four years to learn basic driving patterns in the city when he moved to WAshington). Riding scooters on sidewalks and blithely expecting pedestrians to jump out of the way without even noticing who is about to be run down. The substitution of cell phone feeds for newspapers, magazines and books.
Each of these technologies is highly addictive and shortens our attention span. Individually and collectively, they take us away from other people, our inner lives and ourselves.
4
@Katherine I saw a TV news report recently about a class at a (not very big) college on Long Island where the students had to give up their cell phones for a week (oh the horrors!). One of the major things many of the students had to do to prepare was to learn to get from one class to another without the GPS on their phones.
1
Communications and there’re interrelated systems is my career. For over forty years. I often wonder how history will treat the break up of ma bell. Good thing ( the smart phone) or bad thing ( dark web-trumps twitters). But as most here recognize, there is no longer much money in voice. The money is in data. And the land line will become the modern version of a buggy whip sooner than later. Today’s hardwired landline is not much better than your cable modem phone. Both incessantly jump on and off the internet and use compression parameters till it’s degraded and barely what you can even call a land line. Personally I am glad I never had to grow up with a smart phone. The social bonds with my friends were the line of the land. Hang out together in the real world. Not in a fakery world of likes and selfies.
1
I teach college freshman, and with one essay we were working on how modern communication affects face-to-face conversation. When they found out I didn't have a cell growing up, a student said he felt sorry for me not having one, having missed out on so much. So I asked him, "how much do you miss your flying car?" He stared at me a bit confused. "I don't have a flying car. I, uh--oh..."
To an instructor, there's nothing like that look of realization.
6
I still use my landline for most of my calls. I don't find texting wonderful as most seem to do. It's always being connected and never connected. Worst of all it enables spying. With a landline the government needs a warrant to tap the phone, now they can just listen in and follow you anywhere. No privacy and so many don't seem to care. You should. I like being out and about and the feeling of being free from pointless distraction. I call my cell phone my AAA phone, that's where it comes in handy.
I too remember the family phone, usually in the hall, the hub of activity in the home.
2
Growing up in northern WI, our family commonly went on rainy day weekend drives - in random directions - and if it came to mind that so and so had moved to somewhere hereabouts, we’d ask at a filling station for directions and pop in unannounced to gently inquire if a visit was appropriate. This often but not always led to unplanned big meals and sleepovers and ended with smiles if we pitched in with chores. How is this astonishing compared to marrying a person one meets on a dating site or texting to hint for a visit without being able to see a smile?
There were some good things about landlines. Forgive me if I can’t remember many of them fondly, starting with being tethered to the thing. No one has mentioned the venerable party line though. A two party line was tolerable as I recall, though I was so young I only talked on the phone when a relative wanted to say hello to me or to arrange a play date. A four party line was a nightmare of rude people slamming the phone down if you were using the line when they wanted to make a call. Nostalgia has its limits. Old tech is gone for a reason.
I remember post-war(WWII) south Texas--our first landline was
shared with seven other people(an eight-party line). We were
slowly upgraded. to a four, then a two, and finally, a private line! It was not unusual to have someone pickup their phone and ask
you to hang up so they could make a call.
I am in mourning of the loss of my copper line. If I wanted to keep my landline phone number I have had for close to 40 years I would have to have to switch from copper to fiber. I liked the idea that in case of a blackout a wired phone would still work. I now have to turn on a backup battery. In order to block Incoming calls whose caller I’d is Private I now have to do it online instead of dialing a star command.
1
I not only have a land line, but it is on a dial circuit, which means I can't use it for Voicemail, because it doesn't send out pulses ("For information in English, push 1"). Nobody who calls me ever asks, "Where are you now, is it okay to talk?"
I recently purchased a smart phone because I'm really impressed by the quality of their photographs. That's all I use it for, and I'm quite satisfied with that arrangement.
I will be 82 in a couple of weeks. I have a $1400 iPhone Pro Max in my pocket. I love having both a computer and a camera in my pocket. When I was on a mountain in Uganda about to view a wild gorilla family I reached into my backpack and found that the pro quality Fuji camera and lens had broken, I was still able to get a memorable photograph of the silverback twelve feet away. I rarely use my cell phone as a phone, but I use it to look up information, find the nearest public toilet, translate menus, guide my walks in foreign cities, etc.
I still have my landline too but Verizon is determined to get rid of it. I got a letter from Verizon telling me I won't have it in 3-6 months and I better make other arrangements for the phone number I have had for over 20 years. I'm very sad and of course VERY angry. How dare they?
1
@A.Tankoos Could it be that they're just telling you that in order to keep your landline, you have to switch from copper wires to fiber? That's what happened to us.
2
Love this article. It takes me back to today. I still have a land line with the phone on the wall in the kitchen. Eschewing a smart phone doesn't make my life any more difficult - it's what I've done all my life.
1
You get nostalgic for landlines. I get misty-eyed over dial-up modems. Talk about throwbacks. I wasn't even born when AOL started. That dial-up tone is burned into my psyche. I remember begging my parents to switch to high-speed internet. "High-speed" was a relative term at the time too.
I've never had my own landline. I was late to adopt a smart phone but cell phone technology had already progressed so far I really didn't need one. If my cell phone died, I walked downstairs and used the pay phone across the street. Once pay phones were gone, I dropped off the grid entirely.
If I seriously needed to contact someone, I'd ask a neighbor or a friend to borrow their cell phone. Otherwise, you'd need to find me if you wanted to talk to me. Try smoke signals. Dropping off the grid is seriously underrated.
I honestly miss pay phones more than I miss landlines. They were outdated even when I was young. However, you could have a lot of fun messing with the phone companies. You never had to pay for a call if you knew what you were doing. There was even a time when you could receive incoming calls from other people's cell phones. Gone are the days of phone phreaking though. I had to take a picture of the last functioning pay phone I saw. I used a smart phone.
We are all longing for lost landlines, Roger Cohen. The new age of social media, with all folks who can afford smartphones looking down at the odd dark plastic rectangle, as people used to look down at prayer-books, is our awful reality today. Our children don't know how to write cursive, and can't even read it. They don't know jump rope, and hop-scotch and ring-a-leevio and being called for dinner at dusk. Time is our only commodity left in these days of Earth's climate change.
How many people in America today can remember being on "a party line", sharing the phone with other telephone rate-payers? Listening in to their neighbors or waiting till they finished their precious calls? The thrill and fear of "long-distance" telephone calls! Listening to other people is gone with the wind. Along with daydreaming and remembering the amazing experiences of our lives.
1
I vividly recall an essay we read in English class in which the author (whose name I forget after over 50 years) described how the one thing he would take to a deserted island would be a telephone which he would plug into the sand - and joyfully look at it, knowing that it would never ring and bother him ever again! We've come a long way in 50 years, and not all for the better.
4
Why stop at landlines? Let’s go back to a time before automobiles. Walking, or traveling by horse, is certain to connect you more with your surroundings and fellow travelers. Refrigeration? It only leads to leftovers, and a fridge full of mold-growing experiments. Electricity, for that matter, is highly over-rated...
I'm 86 and have always used a landline
4
Additional thought. From what I have read about helicopter parents if that is the correct expression, an ever growing number of parents must know where their child is at all times, depending totally on the child having a cell phone.
Any parents reading this who can chime in?
We still have what functions as a landline, a VOIP. No smartphone at all, just a TracFone for trips. We do the things you mentioned in your article. Our friends and relatives find it quaint. I intentionally don't get a smartphone so I can enjoy time. It helps that I'm retired! Thanks for your article.
Although my cell phone is a wonderful tool, I too miss the telephone of ancient past. I miss being literally tied to the phone while talking and completely untied when not actively engaged in delicious conversations with friends and family. I miss eye contact and the exchange of pleasantries when walking down the street. I miss not being at the beck and call of others and the expectation that I should always be available. I remember being shown a protocol for a car phone and questioned, "why would I want that?"
I don't miss having to wait by the telephone for a call, and then having no privacy during the call.
1
I don't miss my landline; I still have and use it. It provides nice clear connections. The only time I am disconnected is when a caller is using a cell phone. I am appalled that people accept the terrible quality of cell phone service. I have an old flip cell phone but I only use it for emergencies or while traveling. When I leave my home I am effectively untethered. Nice!
2
Hah. I ordinarily get somewhere between 8 and 20 robo calls on my landline every day. I get, maybe, 1 a week on my cell phone. Grrrrrrr.
2
I've never had a cell phone and find my landline to be just fine. I have no objections to the former, but feel I would miss the more communal aspects of the landline. My wife and formerly my kids would talk and listen on the kitchen phone and the others would follow conversations of general interest, but if the listener preferred privacy, they each had a landline phone in each room.
There is a convenient aspect to the cell phone, of course; I often call and one of the kids or a friend is out walking, etc.
Modern times.
Lets face it, cell phones were designed for text, not talk, they are mini computers, not telephones. I too was forced to give up my landline by Verizon, who cited the expense of maintaining copper wires as the reason. Everything in the end is always about money.
I have noticed for some time now that we have lost the sense of time and place. Beautifully written piece.
5
The one thing I miss about the landline phone is the very long cord which enabled me to
Multi task when I was on a lengthy call at the same time I was making dinner! Ah the good old days 😀
4
@Jean That's what Air Pods are for.
@Nancy
Thank you but I rarely cook dinner for six anymore
EL(dorado)5-6679 and EL(dorado)5-7967 were our families 2 NYC landline numbers. I still remember them fondly. My mother had the second line put in when my older sister became a teenager and there was competition for the phone. A second line was a huge luxury in that era. I even remember my best friend's number RH(inelander)4 -2118.
Sticking your finger in a rotary dial and letting it whirl back with that mechanical clicking sound 7 times seems now like something Fred Flintstone would do.
You could also dial the time if your wind up wrist watch stopped; and dial the weather.
Too much, eh!
I get cell phones of course...and talking to people while driving is a luxury and a time saver. I just wish a little courtesy was exercised in elevators, trains, etc. where if the rude yackers spoke any louder they wouldn't need the phone 'cause the person in northern Nunivat could still hear them.
Happy Winter Solstice people in the Northern Hemisphere...more light is on the way! Take some time to gaze at the sky in silence and take in the Earth's dial tone.
7
I love this. I remember our house phone numbers from sixty years ago - AT (Atlantic)82630, CE(Central)42798.
1
We do have iPhones but I will hold on to our landline as long as "they" let me. For intimate conversations there is NO COMPARISON In terms of sound quality---the landline is SUPERIOR. Not all parts of new technology are improvements.
6
We had to get a landline phone to get a cheaper “bundle” on cable and internet services. I suppose they will be useful during WW3, when all the tele-satellites are destroyed.
Incidentally, when the computers go down at the hospital or during a mass causality emergency when the computers are overrun and useless, we revert to paper charts - which actually work better as no one can steal your data, and they are quicker, and the doctor actually has to come to the bedside to see the patient’s information. While at the bedside now, the doctor might as well pull out that underutilized stethoscope he has adorning the big pocket on his white coat, and actually listen to the patient’s heart tones, as opposed to ordering an echocardiogram from far away at a different hospital while sitting in the doctor’s lounge typing the order on a computer.
When we delivered babies in Nicaragua by Coleman lantern after hours when the generates were shut down, we kept medical records on 3x5 index cards. The mothers and babies did fine - knowing no different. Likewise today, mother and baby do fine usually, despite our advanced technology.
1
Fabulous! And I love Ysatis by Givenchy as well.
Let’s take this a step further. Why are emails and texts often replacing phone calls, both on landlines and cellphones (at least among people I know)? It seems that it is now intrusive to phone someone to see if they want to go for a walk. It’s better - apparently- to use written forms so that the other person can consider your invitation at leisure. For me, this development represents the further distancing between people that has accompanied technological change.
1
As my father would have said, "This whole digital world stinks on ice."
6
With landlines, you called a place. With cell phones, you call a person on the move, anywhere. Can hardly remember. Roger Cohen is superb.
6
A while back a young girl stopped by my garage here in SF and asked if she could use a phone as her cell phone had died and she needed to call her mother.
I pointed to the phone right inside the garage door and she lifted the receiver off the hook and just looked at it. She had no idea how to use a rotary phone. I dialed the number for her and she talked to her mother. When done, she said,"boy that phone sounded good". Western Electric Analog Mic and Speaker...
The loss of the copper to every home is as big a mistake as the abandonment of the rail lines in this country. Stupid.
I know people with children and people who are elderly who have given up their land line. It is very irresponsible.
When you dial 911 and connect they know that instant you actual physical address. If you are having a stroke and are talking gibberish they will know where to send the ambulance. If you three year old picks up and dials 911 they know in an instant where the call is coming from.
We demand that people have smoke alarms, CO2 alarms and now in California new houses have to have fire sprinklers.
Yet, we do not demand that every residence have a hard line to 911!
I suspect that some people died in the fires of the last few years because they did not get a reverse phone call on a land line.
Also, for about 100 years, the AT&T central Office for your copper line had a generator that kept all the communication going as long as the copper stayed connected. Today, you are not that lucky!
4
Miss my horse too.
3
Oh, I love this. Write another about answering machine phase.
Dial tone also had another purpose. It was a 440 A. You could tune any instrument.
7
So connected and so alone.
4
I have too many creditors chasing after me. I could go all day long without a phone (landline or cell) and not have a single worry in the world!
1
When my father lost most of his marbles and lived in a dementia unit, he would daily approach the nurses station and ask them to call Tuxedo 9-0937, his parents who had been dead for years, but that number meant home to him and he knew his parents would come and retrieve him from wherever he was. Should he have had the impossible conversation with my grandmother she would have ended it with “Dead,” maybe meaning the line was going dead. In later years she said, “dead bye,” never goodbye.
Whenever I call my son and his wife I am very conscious that because they have no landline I must choose which person to call. There isn’t the randomness of who might answer. To avoid that dilemma I simply text them both and see who responds. It works but I miss their voices. On the other hand the chance to FaceTime with my 2-year-old grandson is priceless.
2
I have a land line and use it. Ditto cell phone which I take with me when I leave the house. Am in mid-80's and have good deals on both of them. California has a program called California Life Line for seniors with low income; you have to qualify each year (prove your income doesn't exceed qualifications) and I pay under $8.00 per month for my landline service. Like them because they do not need charging like a cell phone. Bought new cell phone this year, meant for seniors as easy to use/read and that cost is less than I was paying for former LG phone service.
1
Am I the only one that has noticed that the audio quality of cellphones is markedly inferior to landlines. As a result, I always use a landline for important calls. Because no one else seems to notice the unacceptable audio quality of cellphones it has experienced zero improvement since its inception. Screens have gotten larger and brighter, the bodies have gotten thinner, battery life has improved, but the audio quality of the most expensive cellphone is as bad as the cheapest.
2
A wonderful tribute to the land line ,,,, and a wonderful tribute to great writing.
7
I'll Roger that, but my landline gathers nothing but dust and robocalls.
1
This is a jewel: “The phone sits in its charger bed like a forgotten fossil.”
I still remember our landline from when I was a kid a million years ago! 555-555-9732 (left out the first two groups, ha-ha). About a year ago I bought a retro rotary phone for at home. I was so proud! Finally I was going to remember telephone numbers! It worked great, until my provider updated their router — now it’s a unless brick. Oh well, I tried.
1
I still have a house phone with a base and three extensions in different rooms. I call it a house phone because it is not a landline. It is a VOIP Magic Jack phone that operates like a land line. Except instead of paying $30 a month, I pay $3 a month. It has a call screening feature that screens ROBO calls. I only give this number to select people, mostly Bankers and Dr's. Yes it has a dial tone and connects to my old wood dial wall phone as well. AND it also rings on my iPhone on Magic App. So I have the benefits of both without the expense. I also only pay $15 a month for my Cell phone service. Total cell and house phone under $20. I am 75 years old and been in computers all my adult life. Retired IBM. Grand kids have no idea what or who IBM is. LOL! They were initially fascinated with the rotary dial until they got their own cell phones at age 9.
4
Along with that landline can we please bring back the "record player" and the music "industry."
2
When I was 4 a Nun asked me our telephone number. I responded....
Ring, Ring, Rinnnnnng. That was two short, one long ring for our rural party line. I was scolded and told to go home and memorize the numbers. 561 4081.
5
In Louisiana many still cling to a landline as they are not tethered to the electric grid and during hurricanes power is lost for a long time and cell towers are wrecked. However the incessant spammers make it most difficult to cling to “Ma Bell”.
3
You won't be nostalgic for it when you're lying on the floor dialing 911 on your cell phone for an ambulance that will arrive in time.
OR heaven forbid the need to track and find your lost grandchild.
Save your nostalgia for all the extinct species we lose daily.
1
I cannot imagine life without my landline. I NEED it to call my cell phone when I can’t recall where in the house I’ve left the dang thing.
11
This is a great retrospective of what’s missing today and why people even risk their lives and others while driving trying to find it, like the insane playing with their fingers. Before the demise of the landline we had two feet on the ground, didn’t we?
we thought we kept our landline because we needed DSL. rural america's connection to the internet and because cell phone coverage is sketchy in our neck of the woods. and now i have a more romantic reason to cite.
1
Amen to all Mr. Cohen wrote. I love my iPhone but sorely miss a landline for many of the reasons cited in the article. Most particularly, I feel vulnerable during storms.
bravo. but they have been invaded by robocalls. how dare they
Had a cell. Hated it. Gave it up. Good riddance.
Out in the world now, it feels like I am the only person "in the present." Everyone else, from infants to ancients, is lost in a screen. I could weep for all they are missing.
6
The landline in my 1970’s era teenage years was the only phone in our home. It was centrally located in the front foyer next to the coat closet at the foot of the stairs. There was no chance of privacy in placing a call, as the rotary phone clicked and dinged with each number dialed. Click-click-click/ding-ding-ding. When you had a phone number with lots of 9’s in it, it became quite a symphony of sound! My teenage self found refuge and an illusion of privacy inside the hall closet for hours on end talking to friends and “lovers”. In those days, an entire household was held hostage from the outside world by the social needs of the lovelorn or angry teenager. I was one of 4 children in that household with the “need” to “reach out and touch someone”, and it must have been a real source of annoyance for my poor parents. That phone is long gone, but the sweet memories of it can still make us all laugh.
7
I have a landline in my home, as well as three extensions. I find it very convenient. It comes with my cable package and costs virtually nothing.
When a call comes in, the caller's info pops up on my tv screen, which is a very cool feature.
I find it convenient in that I don't have to constantly have my cell phone on 24/7. I keep my sanity by turning off my cell phone around 7 pm every single night. I've done this since the very first time I bought my phone. I don't sleep with my phone next to my bed as millions do.
I may be old-school in this sense, but rather have my sanity, my downtime and my privacy intact each day than to constantly be bombarded after my workday is done.
1
To this day I miss the anticipation of who may have called and left a message on my answering machine.
76
@Lee Smith But Lee, the kind of land line Roger is describing predates the answering machine! You may be too young to remember missing a call as you fumbled with the keys to the front door and had no way to know who was calling because the phone had stopped ringing by the time you were inside.
25
@Lee Smith I miss that anticipation too. My husband and I got an answering machine in the 1970s and it annoyed people. Later on, when they become common, people were annoyed if you didn't have one.
17
@Lee Smith
I miss not having an answering machine at all. Life was far less cluttered. I miss the general sense of more patience... when you dialed a phone, you had to wait for the dial to rewind itself. The higher the number, the longer it took to wind back... imagine spending 3-4 seconds dialing just one digit of someone's phone number. There was a very different rhythm to that life that was far more spacious. People were also more securely attached to one another.
25
We had our landline until a few months ago. After 40 years we gave it up because of the incessant spam callers. Though they still call our cell phone,the cells are fewer and farther between. And the daily, constant intrusiveness of spammers, telemarketers, etc. has finally been quieted in our home. Sad to let it go...but it was that or our sanity!
2
The new landlines are VOIP, voice over internet protocol. The phone you plug in may be a familiar old-style telephone, but it is vulnerable to hacking just like (or more so than) the internet via a DSL proxy. Do not trust it.
2
Great observations. I was never comfortable on the (landline) phone, to me, except on rare occasions, phones were to communicate brief bits of information and then off. Yes, I have a cell phone, it has some very convenient features, like a parking app, but just the thought of carrying it around with me all day, of making me available for conversation whenever is frightening. I love the answering machine and especially email, which allow responses as convenient, and after some contemplation. At home or on the go, my phone sits off, unless I have some special communication planned. Several days of the week I go for an hour's walk, the thought of having my walking thoughts interrupted or obscured by a mobile device of any kind is an anathema to me.
The problem with cellphones goes beyond the acceptance of last minute changes of plans. They allow a plethora of call-centers offering unwanted business propositions, or just scammers to interrupt your life at will.
Like Mr. Cohen, I remember when an appointment was some degree of commitment; it wasn't always met, but you weren't compelled to wait more than 10 or 15 minutes before departing. And, those several minutes weren't lost, they were times to consider what might be slowing a friend, reflect on pleasant or disappointing events, watch passerbys and imagine what motivated them without invading their privacy with photos, or concentrate on whatever you wished (rather than the Zombie-teddy bear killer rushing at you on your screen). Your time wasn't irregularly interrupted by call-centers with AI programmed voices that initiated pre-programmed conversations, and when you phoned a business to resolve a problem, it wasn't necessary to repeatedly shout "agent" or "representative" to avoid irrelevant lists of "questions and responses" they were programed to answer. People would even write long-hand, taking notes and weigh alternatives without AI programs.
In addition, there weren't apps to relieve you of every task but relieving yourself.
2
A lost era ? A paradise gone by for ever ?
Maybe some app developer could help us out here ... allow a joint 'pick up' guy for multiple nos, or several mobiles ringing for several nos, and allowing any single of those mobiles to pick up and then divert ...
It may allow for the ultimate social excuse of not being there but with a relative excusing you 'out of home' or 'out of office', to the caller; the caller gets to contend with the social group allowed access to your mobile no; maybe that also reminds us of the chaos generated by a single home number for all; but yes, if you are nostalgic for that era, why not ?
2
Wonderful memories.
I just brought a new landline phone system.
While the phones are black and cordless with neither buttons nor dials there is this a 'lady' who gives me my recorded messages and other information upon request.
Is she the operator?
Meanwhile my cell phone keeps on getting smarter and smarter than me and the same lady speaks to me from the device.
She does get around.
1
It's downright rude to call somebody on a device that will inevitably do one of the following if not all three: seethe with static, fade in and out, or lose connection entirely. Add in the fact that every time you put one to your ear you are microwaving your brain, and we're looking at a "convenience" that is anything but.
3
Awesome. So true. Is all technology an 'advancement'? Oh, no. So much of it is trash, entertainment with lies, disinformation, wasted moments.
I ride a bike. This helps me 'see' more, at a human pace and scale. It's simple, yes, but that's okay. I walk the same woods I did as a child. They're always wondrous and sacred. Keep your video games and viral videos and disinformation from billionaire bots or troll from Russia or China. I think I just read about a pro-Trump Facebook group out of Vietnam, masquerading as Americans. I remember reading about a Black Lives Matter group, very popular, that was actually a man in Australia. What a joke this all is.
See your community. Talk to people. Help and serve in a personal and real way. Simple. That's the truth.
My favorite land line was a single direct line to the auto parts supplier
A wall phone with no dial, long cord
Pick it up and usually immediately a familiar voice would say hello
Then I barked out an efficient parts order, no chit chat
Very soon a driver in the store’s small pickup truck brought exactly what I needed
We bought at least $1000 a day every day
Once I met the voice, we were old friends by then
I don’t miss beepers which forced us to find a phone both, yet somehow mine always had a dead battery...
2
What's next, a lament on the passing of buggy whips?
4
As a die-hard landline user, I liked this piece very much and simply wish to share my own thoughts on the subject, as published in The Daily Beast earlier this year: https://www.thedailybeast.com/i-ditched-my-landlinecutting-the-cord-of-memory-is-harder?ref=author
OK, boomer, forget about the nostalgia -- you made this world, now you have to live in it! Indeed, we all do -- and the more we learn, it seems that the much-vaunted technology you guys sold us was actually selling us down the river! Let's see, where to begin? Nuclear energy -- electricity too cheap to meter. Until we had Chernobyl, Fukushima, and a plume of radioactive seawater drifting across the Pacific. How this old chestnut? One word: plastic! Now we're producing 300 million tons each year, with no place for the waste, more plastic than fish in the sea in a decade or two.
How about the beauties of oil and the internal combustion engine, the heyday of Motor City and the muscle car? Now we've got CO2 at double preindustrial levels and climate crisis almost out of control! The Digital Age? Now corporate and government spying 24/7, even little girls in their bedrooms. (Read it in the NYTimes!) Big Brother would be green with envy.
Full disclosure: I'm a Baby Boomer, too. But it was apparent in the Sixties to those of us paying attention that unbridled capitalism plus powerful technology meant disaster, both for human society and the environment.
3
I only have a cell phone for 2FA authentication - I will never ever carry one of these awful things around with me. Noisy, expensive little time bandits that belong in the garbage.
My entire phone expense is $43 / year via an IP phone that works just fine anywhere in the world.
At first I thought the cell phones were a good idea: for emergencies.
Now many think it's creative and wonderful to walk and talk at the same time, or discussing whether to buy the large or small can of peas at the supermarket.
Much worse is looking into one's rear view mirror at a red light and seeing a fool yapping as he approaches. What fun!
4
Great, another nostalgia piece.
I’ll file this piece away with the one someone will write about over missing the smartphone 50 years from now.
1
I give up - why is there a squash in the photo with the phone and Winston Churchill?
5
I still have, use, and rely on my landline. You can't have a decent conversation on a cell. Acoustically they're akin to talking from the inside of a toaster. plus, I never get it placed correctly on my ear. Plus, I hate the way they feel.
The technology has us by the short hairs, but it stinks.
1
And now one must bring a cell phone to the grocery store to take advantage of discount coupons posted for “your mobile device”. Another way to track us. I regard these sales techniques as discriminatory and have said this to store managers. I recently witnessed a heated exchange at the checkout counter. A senior was telling the clerk he had a cell phone but didn’t understand how to use it for the discounts. “Just download the App,” the clerk snapped. The customer shook his head and left with his purchase. Then the clerk started a conversation with the next customer. “It’s so easy. I don’t understand why people make it so hard for themselves.”
Yes how bout that pink “princess phone “?
Just cut my landline thru Cox cable. Too many robo calls. And I found out that it would be useless in a storm. It isn’t a real hardwired phone. As useless with dropped connections as my cell so why pay $30 a month for aggravation at dinner time. ?
Ahhh --good old days--playing in the neighborhood outside and hearing the ring--and letting it.....
Hi folks,I'm 87 so I instruct everyone who I want to call me to call my home phone, which records caller messages & is tied to a "landline" that is powered from my home, not from a local phone central office. Real landlines don't exist here in Los Angeles, but I bet there are still small towns with party lines where different codes, like two longs & a short, or three short rings. I was a Signal Corp technician in Alaska where our outfit, The Alaska Communication Service, handled civilian calls & military teletype messages. We had touch tone dialing in Anchorage in 1952. But I also served in Glenallen, a remote settlement about halfway between Anchorage & Fairbanks, where we had local party lines as described above.
Now in L.A. we live in the San Fernando Valley & I'm a very curious guy. I talk to anyone who interests me at the gym or in stores. Today I told a rather new checkout lady that I was reading the biography of the painter Henry Toulouse-Lautrec & she told me she was planning a trip to Toulouse, France soon. When I see her again soon I will show her my book & give her a photocopy of the front cover. How cool is that? At the gym I have a hobby of learning the first names of anyone I see often -- this keeps me going to the gym as I'm encouraged by hand-bumps from guys or smiles from girls.
To me meeting other people does not require a landline phone.
-------------
The love affair with the cell-, smart-, mobile-phone is an addiction. Make no mistake about it. I have seen many users mindlessly swiping their phone screen with nary a little time to even notice what's on it, occasionally reversing the direction of the swipe from side to side, to top-down. In reality, there is very little that has to be communicated RIGHT NOW to a dozen "friends" whom we have not seen in a long time, some we might not even have met.
My landline is my main communication tool with several extensions in different rooms of the house. I do get occasional calls on my mobile phone, and tell the caller to please call me on my landline next time as the quality of sound is better as it is not subject to reception problems.
No, I cannot take pictures with my landline phones, even the cordless ones. But I have a camera for that which I carry with me if I feel like it on a walk. No, nobody said "the best camera is the one you have with you" meaning "any camera." Jay Maisel's comment referred to any type of camera you carried with you not to take a photograph only to lose it seconds later among fifty-thousand-plus others, perhaps never to see it again.
No, cell-, smart-, mobile-phones are a very strong form of addiction that nobody is willing to admit. That makes us blind, totally blind to the darkness of technology lurking under that veil.
Thanks for the walk down memory lane. I had my 80th birthday this week. I grew up in a rural area and remember party lines. You never knew when your neighbors listened in, so conversations were brief and not personal. And just yesterday my youngest granddaughter taught me how to use the messaging app. Change for sure. Progress - who knows for sure.
"Time drifted. It was not raw material for the extraction of productivity. It stretched away, an empty canvas." Very nice, poetic line (and true!). As a teenager, I had a neighbor who answered his landline with "Hello, your telephone is working." That always made me chuckle, and it's now the greeting on my cell phone.
I still have a landline. Considering that we now have no privacy through our cell phones, that advertisers and both domestic and foreign governments can hack in at any time, I think a landline is a wonderful thing.
2
Interestingly there are still places where 4G, LTE AND Copper-wired landlines co-exist and flourish. India. It's a very refreshing experience - to know and to see that while the new is embraced, people still rely just as much on the home 'landline' for down-time conversations.
I have no cellphone. My landline is upstairs, and I leave it there to ring its head off when I don't feel like answering. But I can do even better than just not having a cellphone. I have no television set. How's that for having time to look around, see people, daydream?! And read.
4
Thank you for deviating from writing on Trump or the impeachment. Yet you indirectly did write about those two more profoundly. Cell phone made this presidency and saved it. Without Twitter to create a parallel universe for his base that now includes the GOP this president is gone. Remember his live tweet during the hearings? Landline wouldn’t have allowed it. Yes, bring it back.
1
Well, Rog, this explains your Hemingway interlude in the Sierra de Guadarrama.
That was serious down time.
You are a nostalgist.
1
I was brought up in a home where the phone was considered a rude interruption and a luxury expense. If the phone rang when we were eating, it was rule not to answer. Many times it would ring and my mother would just sit and continue reading or unloading the washer ignoring it.
Fortunately everyone texts now so my landline never rings. After 15 years without a cell phone even my close friends try to text me on my landline.
Growing up the mantra was: if they really need to talk to you, they'll find you.
2
One of the great losses of cell phone culture is that the audio is so crappy that it destroys any possibility of intimate conversations. In the old days, you could pick up a land line and feel the presence of the other person through the subtle inflections in their voice. With cell phones, the voice of the person at the other end of the communications channel sounds like the teacher in a Charlie Brown comic strip : "Wa-Wonk-Wa-Wonk-wa-wa-WONK!"
This data-driven age without any attention to quality is a sign of the lack of appreciation of culture for quality and beauty.
4
My mother would only let us children answer the phonewhen we memorized this phrase "No, s/he is not here right now. May I please take a message?" And then we would write down the message for the intended recipient on good old fashioned paper. It was just the 1970's but it seems so far away.
4
Thank you for this beautiful remembrance of what we have lost, besides the dial tone. I mourn the loss of dialing a friend’s home and not knowing who might answer, perhaps a child or preteen saying, “Stewart residence, who’s calling please?” ... and then a precious opportunity to speak with that child or preteen for a moment. Or perhaps the friend’s spouse, providing for the brief but delightful, “ Jim, how’s your garden this summer?” before being transferred to Jim’s wife, my friend. Individual cell phones have advantages, but they also isolate us from being “connected” in a greater sense. Sadly, phone etiquette is not taught to children, and in fact appears to longer exist.
2
I miss friends calling to tell me a really great new joke. We laughed together and chatted for a few minutes, catching up, and enjoying the time.
Now everybody forwards jokes to a list of email addresses. I don’t even know who some of the people on the list are - but I would probably like to.
I don’t enjoy the jokes as much. I think I enjoyed the people calling me most of all.
1
There are 252 comments so far, all that I have read longing for the good old days. I suggest that all who submit comments from this moment on - submission moment Saturday 21 December 09:56 GMT - add their age.
If they happen to be within 3 or 4 decades of my age and yet do not long for the good old days, they might indicate by writing: Apparently I am the exception that confirms the rule.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Citizen US SE
2
@Larry Lundgren
An 82-year-old woman, here. Not longing for the "good old days" because the misogyny was even worse than it is today. (Don't have a cellphone, but that's neither here nor there.)
2
@Larry Lundgren - Corrections to my comment when it appeared at 12:31 GMT.
Age 87
"Apparently..." that is you too are the exception to the rule that most Cohen readers are older and long for the good old day.
I'm old enough to recall having a "party line," i.e., we shared a phone line with a neighbor, usually unknown to us. It was not unusual to have a phone conversation interrupted by our party line partner to tell us we were on the phone too long and to (sometimes please) get off.
On the positive side, I had a friend who was and still is rather gruff. My mom would answer the phone and be greeted by "is Angelo there?" No hello Mrs. X, how are you doing? My mom would have none of it. Her response was always "oh high Frank, how are you? How are your parents?" I'm sure it drove Frank nuts, but it was mom's way of offering a lesson in civility to Frank each time he called.
1
why is there a zucchini on the table?
3
@alangorkin
It might be a stand-in for a cellphone. (One of the earlier models.)
1
I still have a land line. While I also have a cell phone, I refuse to have it on all my waking hours. I only use it for directions and for calling while on trips. Also, I absolutely refuse to text, and so what if I miss out on some deals on Craigslist. I'm old enough (70) to remember having a party line with the next door neighbors and occasionally picking up the receiver only to hear the lady next door chatting away with a girlfriend. When I'm out bike riding, one of the biggest hazards on the greenway are the people walking along with phones stuck in their faces, meandering back and forth across the path and getting mad at you for calling out when you pass and invading their space. I have a simple solution for the condition Mr. Cohen raises: turn off your darn phone.
1
Still have mine. Until the phone co takes them away. Cell phones disconnect people from their surroundings. even vacations, the online world leaves nothing to chance. everythings planned in advance. evil.
1
So timely, after fighting with Verizon and Optimum for over a week I finally have my 25 year old landline phone number back!! It went missing for a few days when i changed services and it seemed like It would never come back to me......and i was inexplicably upset about it.....no one answers the poor old thing at home anymore but I use it to call friends and family....I have my mobile number too but there is something about my landline that feels special....when I reach out on that number it’s more than just a few digits.....it’s me, my home, my family reaching out to say hello, how are you, is all well.....I was going to give it up fighting for it after today if optimum wouldn’t release my hostage landline number....but they did and now I am never letting it go!!!!!
3
It is criminal that companies like Verizon are forcing people to give up landlines. Landlines have the safety feature of usually staying up when everything else goes down when power is lost.
Yet another example of the failure of capitalism, putting the almighty dollar ahead of public safety.
4
I'm old enough to be a Democrat presidential nominee and I have a landline deal in which I get unlimited calls within Australia for a modest monthly fee.
Its great advantage is that it's equipped with an answering machine that gives audible notice of incoming calls. If I recognise the number, I answer it. If I don't, I let the answering machine cut in and tell the caller nobody is available. Genuine callers leave messages. Robocalls give up. Microsoft virus fixers, eat your hearts out!
3
Evelyn Waugh remarked that Vile Bodies is the first novel in which the telephone figures largely. Still uncollected in Aldous Huxley's earlier story "On the Telephone".
1
All the novelties are manifestations of Ecclesistes 7:29, "God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions". As far as privacy and security go, landline can be tapped as easily as iPhone is snooped in cyberspace.
I dread calls on my cell phone. Yes, it has some little holes on the bottom where sound from my voice supposedly enters. On my landline, the handset is angled up at the bottom toward my mouth. It has holes too but that angled up portion is so much more meaningful to me, like it's meant to catch my voice so that others will hear me. I shout into my cell phone still unconvinced that the flat bottom with holes actually captures my voice. Like others, I use it only when I have to. Thanks, Roger for some nostalgia.
3
@blgreenie
just put it on speaker
A "profound shift?"
Landlines are mentioned in Ben Lerner's latest novel:
"From a family systems perspective, a lot has been lost with landlines. Think about how often—before cell phones, before any kind of caller ID—you answered the landline as a child and had to have an exchange, however brief, with aunts or uncles or family friends. Even if it was that five-second check-in, How are you doing, how is school, is your mom around—it meant periodic real-time vocal contact with an extended community, which, through repetition, it reinforced. Now you never speak to anyone unless they call you directly. I love FaceTiming with the girls, I'm not just mourning the older technology, but I think it's actually a profound shift..." —Bern Lerner
The Topeka School. Granta Books, p89. UK Edition.
I still have my landline and a small "dumb" phone to carry on errands. The little guy calls and texts only.
This is the life. I'm so glad I chose this way to go; I find it terrible to walk into the metro or a bus and see 80% of heads bent over square things. The bright side is that the other 20% and I commune and understand one another: noticing, and living, life!
1
Pure chuckle. Grew up on that great invention called a party line with 12 families. Every conversation was public. Now on to the present. Until just a couple of years ago, there was no cell service where we live and even now we use wifi calling to prevent dropped calls. We have gigabit fiber optic so go figure. There are many areas within 10 miles of the house where there is none as well as many areas where I travel in flyover country. We keep a landline with an old fashioned dial phone. Even with a fiber optic connection, the backup batteries in their system will let you make an old fashioned dial call with power out and cell towers knocked out.
When I was a teenager we had a cuckoo clock not far from the phone. When my best friend could hear it cuckoo the hour a second time during our call, we knew we had been on the phone too long (at least in our parents’ eyes).
6
A landline in hurricane prone areas is not a philosophical stance, it just makes sense. Cell towers fall or become choked with calls in an emergency, power is off for days or weeks. I have a bare bones plan and the $45/month provides assurance that I will not be cut off when the next “big one” hits.
@Upset Yes, but only if you still have copper phone lines. Here in NYC they have replaced those lines (as they no longer wanted to do maintenance on them, and if they don't use those lines they no longer have the restraints they had regarding required service.) The phone companies offer a battery back-up but that is only good for a day or so.
1
I'm old enough to remember 'party lines.' Talk about knowing that you were part of a neighborhood. Then again, the other day I went to the market with a handwritten shopping list, including ingredients to make banana bread. Good thing I had a cell phone to receive the text from my wife that she looked on the shelves and saw that we were out of baking soda. Great column Mr. Cohen!
2
There is also some comedian’s great comment about how, during a quarrel, it was so satisfying to hang up by slamming down the phone. No satisfaction at all in just swiping it off now !
178
@Enlynn Rock it was Jerry Seinfeld...
10
@Enlynn Rock : Unless you have a flip phone. There is some dramatic flair to hanging up on someone by flip phone.
8
I am 49, and feel really silly using words like "landline" and (gag) "selfie". My friends think I'm a hoot because I own two phones, one for my home, and my cell. My cell is a 15 year old flip phone that won't accept emojis. If someone sends me a happy face, it wipes out the entire message. I write back (by keystroke), "My phone is not smart. Treat me like a old time movie and explain you're thinking."
1
@ABG
Today's smart phones substitute for the smart that's not so much in today's heads.
Here here! Your nostalgic homage to the land line struck at the very heart of what saddens me most days. Constant contact without meaning or purpose reduces the soul to an amoeba. We made plans then, and we had time and space where no one could find us. In that space we could recognize our collective humanity with a head held high just as you described. Smart phones might be what dumbs us all down. Or is it numbs us all down? Sadly I am only 42 and thereby sentenced to many more years of hyper connectivity that daily makes me wish I were a monk.
7
This column is a plaintive cry in the wilderness about the inexorable march of progress: the genie's-out-of-the-bottle thing.
Science and technology do not move backwards. We are forced to plod along, largely in lockstep.
So you like landlines? Soon you will only find them in the same places where the wax cylinders are, if you enjoy listening to your music that way.
We are human beings. Like it or not, this is our lot in life.
Still, we might find solace in these words: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Are our feeble attempts at progress ultimately all for naught?
Do landlines have something to tell us about our current predicaments?
Maybe they do have something to say, if only we could answer the call. But that would mean losing our round-the-clock connectivity, ironically enough.
2
Because I grew up with 5 siblings, often our landline would be “busy” when I was trying to call home for a ride from the library or a movie. No problem! I just called the neighbors across the street (who had 7 kids) and asked whoever answered their landline “Can you just run across the street and ask someone to pick me up?” They did the same for us when their landline was busy!
5
Coming from the same impulse, I miss the lazy mornings in Roman piazzas reading the International Herald Tribune from cover to cover because it was all the written English I was going to get that day.
Now I can spin through pages and pages of media on my phone, as often as not putting it down because attempting to engage with the massive amounts available seems overwhelming.
3
You can still have a landline now but the IT crooks will tell you if you want it you also have to get other things you don't want for 100+ dollars a month.
Time to partially re regulate IT.
Airlines were deregulated and although we got horrible service, prices did go down.
With IT, we got the worst of both worlds, horrible service and skyrocketing prices.
6
I,m sorry, Mr Cohen, but I do not believe that you actually have a landline because if you did, you'd know that that formerly wonderful center of the home has been hijacked by incessant robo-callers to the extent that the sound of the ringing phone, once a call towards joy, is now a dread signal.
Neither do you describe the efforts of the phone companies to rid themselves of maintaining the copper wire infrastructure and their cavalier posture of "too bad" when there's a maintenance failure.
5
Though I work in engineering and programming, I've refused ever to get a cell phone and take a certain amount of abuse for this. I am easily reachable via land line or email. I also have time to think without being tethered to an interrupting device. Clients would expect me to be available all the time if I had a cell phone. Now, I just get a single strange look when I explain that I don't. Communication hasn't actually been impaired. If, I could only, kill off the robocalls on the land line.....
5
i have not had a decent call on a cell phone. 30years.
1
People overall may over time really regret this. The cell phone culture is essentially creating a type of group mental illness. Subtle and not so subtle.
It's not as nice a society as it was before all of it. People have to talk louder on cell phones than they do on most landlines. The young seem not to understand this
Humans are getting less benefit as human beings from cell phone culture than they are benefits. In my 61 years I've never seen a more detrimental technological move than this. Ugly and fetishistic and basically not too humanistic.
1
It is possible and often desirable to leave your cell phone at home when you go out...a virtual land line! :)
4
Memories of a bygone era. I was about 7 when I returned to the family phone and exclaimed, " Daddy says that he is not home!"
5
@Peter Close
That's as good as the comedian's telephone bit (was it Shelly Berman?), speaking to the little girl who's answered: "Is your mommy there?... Well, when she's finished, would you ask her to come to the phone?"
A big believer in paradox, I see the cell phone as an extension of the mesmerizing empowerment of the button. I remember the first tv remote control. Amazing! God like power! At the mere push of a button - look! the channel changed by itself! Here let me try. What a sense of omnipotence! Humanity - we have now solved the quest for our raison d’être. This is our goal on this planet. And, indeed, in the ensuing decades it seems most of our science and technology has been aimed at being able to allow us to get whatever we want at the push of a button. Voila - the CD arrives 3 days later in the mail, the new shirt a day after that. And we can even execute these purchases virtually anywhere from our smartphone. What god like empowerment! And whadda you know, 4 decades later doesn’t it begin to feel like we are now slaves to the button? It follows us everywhere. We are pushing, clicking, entering pass words, log ins, etc, etc. etc. Yes - be careful for what you wish for. And btw, I have a landline. I use it for about 98% of my phone activity. The cell spends 98% of the time on the kitchen counter recharging. It’s my best effort in a losing battle against the button tyrant.
3
We have a landline. I'm home most days, all day. We do not answer our landline. Ever. Ninety percent of the calls are grifters or political in nature. Same thing really. The other day after the impeachment vote, it literally rang all day. Polls wating to know what we thought, I guess. There are days when I want to rip it off the wall and crush it under a tire. We keep it because cell service is spotty here. People who call it know we don't answer it unless they start talking when the machine kicks in. It used to have a ringer outside so we'd hear it in the garden but when a weasel chewed the line, we never replaced it. You will get more versions of this story in the comments. Lax regulations have made landlines ridiculously annoying. Romanticize them all you want but try living with one in 2019. The good old days you'll long for won't be the ones you describe here.
2
In the fifties we had a party line and a nosy neighbor would answer our number when she knew it was our ring. No robocalls then.
3
I don't have a cell phone account, but while traveling I recently had my computer stolen and it was almost to set up my accounts without a cell, so I had to buy a SIM card. I hate cell phones. When I got a new 'cable' account for my TV, they removed the copper wires from my house. A few weeks late, the power was out after a storm for nearly a week, I had no phone, I did not know they had removed the copper wire and fought to have it put back. This is a problem. Last year, I was in another country and all the restaurants were filled, it turned out I was out on Valentine's Day. I looked around me, couples everywhere, none of them staring into the eyes of their darlings, everyone staring at their screens. Finally, last summer, in yet another country, I sat in my rental car at the side of the road, hazard lights flashing. I watched as several cars went around me, in my rearview mirror, but then noticed someone staring at his phone. He crashed into me, shoving my car 25 meters forward. I was still belted in, his car was totalled. I hate what cell phones have done and am grateful my kids grew up before they happened. Sadly, I couldn't get a landline, even if I wanted one.
3
We use a landline for our designated junk call phone. The do-not-call list is worthless, so we keep a landline just for that purpose and never answer it.
4
Roger, I have only a landline and it works just fine. Now, moments ago I was Skypeing with relatives overseas and saw a baby and a Christmas tree. I'm not a complete primitive.
3
All I want for Christmas is my old landline back.
1
"They were, through such random encounters, entwined in the lives of others. My mother might ask afterward, “Darling, who’s Caroline?” I could not avoid some response, however evasive."
Excellent point and lesson for many parents out there. Allowing your children their own phone/device is you being complicit in helping them build a wall around themselves. In self-isolating, in being immersed in a miasma of interactions with their peers, and who knows who else, that mostly confuse them.
Having their own device is allowing them to withdraw from your important insight and input on who and how they interact with their friends and the Culture in general. Sure, your input will be deemed stupid and parental, and overbearing, and it is...but its a necessary ingredient to their growth.
Those devices give them permission and an easy means to sneak around and make not only dopey decisions, but very often dangerous ones. And they can do it all without you ever knowing.
Make sure your children know that the devices are borrowed, are given by You, with permission, and clear understanding that they are not owned, and as such can be taken from their temporary care. Explain that they are tools, and not some device with power of its own. That what they do is allow access, but are not controls on their lives.
And especially make sure you're NOT the worst example of someone who is obsessed with their own device.
Still no cell phone here. And I’m 47. With an 11 yr old. And a land line.
3
Sweet sentimental column, Roger. Your mother asking awkwardly, "Darling, who was that calling?" Reality is calling me now but I enjoyed this sentimental trip in a time gone by.
1
What I miss is the chunky Bakelite phones...sure, the curly cords got tangled and pulled your hair out, but the receiver never got separated from the base! And the shape of the receiver was a thousand times better—the mouthpiece was right where you needed it, the sound went directly into your ear, and you could hold the phone with your shoulder if you needed your hands for something.
222
@Patricia Ahh the Bakelite phone! If you picked up the receiver with a bit too much excitement you could really give yourself a pretty good whack in the head. That was another reason for teaching kids how to properly answer a phone.
6
@Patricia If you have working phone jacks, you can still get and use bakelite phones in working condition on eBay.
6
Thank you, Mr. Cohen. The extinction of random moments is one of the sorrier features of modern life, made all the more maddening by how difficult that loss is to explain to those who have never experienced a simple and unpredictable joy such as answering a phone without knowing who the caller is! Last year, in part out of nostalgia for the lost randomness of our lives, I dropped everything and hitchhiked for three weeks across the country. Delightful disconnection!
2
Make me laugh ,less landlines due to cellular phones allowed UNION workers like me to retire at 50!
I've been getting into watching old Perry Mason tv reruns lately. When I was a kid in the 1950s, my parents would not let me watch that show because it was too "adult" for me.
Perry is always leaving a forwarding number with his secretary Della Street when he is going out into LA to check on something (usually finding a dead body in the process) or ducking into a pay phone booth to make an urgent call. He is always looking for a phone.
Because he is Perry Mason, he almost never fails to connect with the person he needs. But he's always stressed about it and I can't help but think a cell phone would have made his life a lot easier.
2
And BTW, the landline is a lot cheaper than any cell phone.
Missing the old landline telephone in age of smartphone?
I don't miss the landline at all, and don't find the smartphone necessarily better. The problem for me has always been trying to discover/create quality communication period, and I define quality communication as the process of two or more people or parts coming together and there is a transcendence, a combination, a clicking together which innumerable studies of creativity have confirmed and there is a leaping upward to higher comprehension of reality and life.
You can see this in everything from a great rock concert to athletic event to just two friends talking. But the tragic thing is that somehow (and we humans have pointed fingers in innumerable directions to blame) this process always seems to be short circuited or shut down or compromised in one way or another, so it matters little the advancement or lack of technology if the art and science of communication is not developed toward something of total integration and heightening of entire system.
Neuroscience is now engrossed with trying to discover exactly the relationship between human consciousness and the brain, and of course how the brain functions in part and whole. This problem is probably identical in more than a few respects to trying to integrate all society in advanced communication to right vision, higher collective reasoning, something of ecstatic and flourishing and higher dreaming of entire social system.
Wish I were there to see it.
The "old fashioned" land line is powered by a huge battery bank, with standby diesel generators, located at the "central office" - the neighborhood connection point for all the phone lines in that area.
This means that you still will have emergency phone service when the electrical power to your house is gone for several days in a storm.
The cable service internet-based phones only have a very small battery inside which can provide an hour or so of service ... if the repeater/amplifiers in the cable system are still running. They too have very limited battery back-up. I still keep a landline for this reason.
I also prefer having a true phone line to use for secure fax transmission of sensitive documents and credit card information.
2
@WRH Here in NY the phone companies refused to do maintenance on the copper lines and then forced everyone to go to the new lines.
2
We had cordless phones in the early 90’s, when we first got married.
When our oldest daughter turned 12, we put a good old-fashioned corded phone in the kitchen.
When she got a cell phone in 10th grade (2010), the rule for all of us was ‘phones in the basket when you are in the house, only the landline can be used for conversations’.
She is out of college and our youngest is a junior in college and we recently sold that house and are temporarily living in an apartment while we build a smaller home.
This apartment is two years old and they didn’t run phone lines to it, so for the past six months all we have had are our cell phones.
I cannot wait to move, put the basket by the door again, and hang the corded phone.
1
I do not have a cell phone.
I have a land line. It has never been misplaced or stolen. It has never lost the signal or suffered a dead battery in the middle of a call. It has never interrupted a walk in the park, barged in on a face-to-face conversation, or taken my mind off the road when driving.
I am thinking about getting a cheap cell phone, solely because my car and I are both getting older, and I would prefer not to get stranded in a world where good samaritans can be as scarce as payphones.
I won't give out the number.
1
I have a longing for Ma Bell. The REAL AT&T.
The most benevolent monopoly and greatest company there ever was.
6
I miss being able to call a household, say, my brother's, and speak to anyone who picks up. It was a stable way to stay in touch with nieces, nephews, sisters-in-law, i.e. members of the family with whom one one might not call directly.
I also miss the fact that people actually picked up their phones. It's way too easy to ignore the chirp of a cell, pressing the button to silence it or send a text.
5
And if there were two or more phones in the home the possibility existed that another family member, perhaps one's mother, could pick up surreptitiously, silently, and listen in to the conversation of a son or daughter and discover through eavesdropping what she had suspected but had not yet confirmed.
2
“Time drifted. It was not raw material for the extraction of productivity. It stretched away, an empty canvas.” Very poetic, nicely said.
6
I still have a landline. It comes with the TV and internet service. And I use it regularly. It’s so much clearer than the mobile phone. I use my cellphone in the car and when I’m not home. But when I’m home I use the landline. And my friends and family first call the landline and when I don’t answer it, then they call the cellphone.
4
My wife and I of course have cell phones. But, we also have 3 Princess phones-all working, and an old AT&T phone that still has the redial buttons. The buttons correspond to my daughters number when she was in college, she was 19, and she is now 50.
It has my mothers number when we lived in NYC and she lived in Fla. We are living in Fla for 28 years now. It has other numbers of family members who are long gone. Button #5 has to pushed a little harder(old age I guess of the phone). My sons number is on that phone when he went to law school 20 years ago. Looking at the phone is just a wonderful reminder of our family history. Occasionally, I will push one of the buttons to see what happens. My law office number was on the phone and I pushed it-now a Chinese restaurant has my old law office number. One of the redial buttons has the name "JuJu" which was my mother-in-laws nick name-she died in 1997. My mothers button-who died in 2007 is labeled "Mom Fla." As I write this ,and sometimes, when I look at the phone tears come to my eyes. That little landline phone holds so many good memories of conversations long gone- I shall never give that phone up. In fact, I will add a codicil to my Last Will and Testament directing that the phone have a source of funds to preserve it into the future. I gotta go now someone is calling on the landline.
11
In addition to the beauty of the design, a handle meant for comfort in the human hand, and the heft - I remember using the landline phone in several plays as a prop - there is the clarity and crispness of the signal, never have to strain, never having to ask callers to repeat themselves, that the voice on the other end is the recognized voice of one's mother, one's friend, and never having to wonder, pre-caller ID, whether the person on the other side is not 'picking up' because he is choosing to ignore you, etc.
4
Thank you for this reminder. People chase new tech as if it were manna. It's not! More often, simpler is best.
8
Of course, one always picked up the receiver and listened before dialing - listened for the dial tone. That, though, was a habit born in the age of the "party line" when several families shared the line, though not, I think, the same number. It was also because many homes including our suburban house had a downstairs phone and upstairs "extension." Listening was to be sure no one else was on the phone. I'm old enough to remember party lines - an inconvenience, sure, but also a part of living in community, having patience, and sharing.
What is sad to me, though I am good with my smart phone and gave up my landline several years ago, is the way that current phones encourage isolation. Riding the 'L' or bus folks are much less likely to notice when someone elderly, pregnant, or otherwise might need a seat. There is less interaction and less curtesy. Everyone is staring intently at a small screen, not noticing others. That is sad.
5
No more dial tone for us in NJ. Verizon got rid of all the landline cables and now the landline is like a cell phone emitting radiation and spotty.
1
Greetings to all from Rural America Without Broadband. And without cell service as well. I am one of >25 million Americans who don’t miss my landline because I have no option but to keep it. Yes is sounds tranquil and bucolic, but not so much when doing your homework or submitting a college application means an after dinner drive to the darkened community center and sitting in the parking lot with a laptop perched on the car’s center console. When considering the growing inequality gap in America, please, fellow NYT readers, step up and advocate for those of us who wish we had the cellphone troubles that you do!
13
Telephony is a dying communication method.
We keep our landline because DSL is the fastest and most cost-effective internet technology available. But we turned off the ringer and let the answering machine handle the dozens of spam calls it gets on a daily basis. I still do not understand the woman who leaves messages in Chinese from different numbers on my mobile phone.
2
@Don
I've been getting messages in Spanish. Though I do speak, and teach, the language, how do they know that? (My name means something in Spanish. Does Don mean something in Chinese, maybe?)
On September 11, 2001, I lived in a small jewel of a building 20 blocks northeast of the World Trade Center. Like me, several of my neighbors were home at 8:50 a.m. Unlike me, none of them had a landline, consequently, my apartment became the center of communication and commiseration. That phone became the touchstone by and through which we were bound by grief and a need for community when all outside was chaos.
17
The standard for reliability has been phone service provided by central carriers over many decades. Sure, there are times when phone poles got hit by cars or lightning, but with the advent of buried lines, there were fewer physical interruptions. Most people don't know that COs, or Central Offices had massive banks of batteries to power the calls along with the switching, so even if there were an interruption in power, many hours of service continued. I recall having the experience of realizing that even if the power to our farm was out, you could still get a dial tone and that one thing still worked. The uptime figures are now a blur, but it was something like 99.999% of the time phone service from central offices was available. Sure cell towers shave generators and such, but in a time of emergency, they still will need fuel and the clamor for access by those feeling the need for security is to call and occupy a slice of service that many others are trying to get. Landlines only were overloaded when some radio station had a call-in for a big give away.
Unfortunately, while in the past service was mandated, the last decade has seen companies like AT&T tell rural customers that if their service goes out, too bad, there is no plan to restore the reliable, usually underground, copper link to the world.
3
Telephony is a dying communication method.
We keep our landline because DSL is the fastest and most cost-effective internet technology available. But we turned off the ringer and let the answering machine handle the dozens of spam calls it gets on a daily basis. I still do not understand the woman who leaves messages in Chinese from different numbers on my mobile phone.
Lovely elegy - and I completely agree. Too bad there's no going back. To a certain extent, I feel the same way about the experience of reading the "paper." - I do it almost entirely on line now and it's a very disruptive experience, difficult to really read pieces with ads jumping in and constant distractions provided by the very "paper" that wants me to read it! I used to find print ads interesting, at least sometimes, now I regard on line ads as enemies to be deleted as quickly as possible. Anyway, I stray from the subject. Thank you for writing this piece.
11
In my first real job, I lived alone in Florida. It paid so little I lived in a one-room apartment over a detached garage, and could not afford a landline. So, once a week, on Sunday morning, I drove down the street to a pay phone (in a phone booth) to call my parents. I had with me a pocket full of coins to feed the phone and connect the call.
I was lonely, I won't lie, and I missed home and my Mom and Dad. We talked until the coins ran out, and I promised to call again in a week.
Looking back, that dial-up public phone was more than a landline. It was a lifeline for my former 22-year-old self.
12
As someone who missed/skipped class the day it was explained why we should subordinate privacy, quiet, and priorities to the next person who wants us to contribute to a cause or candidate, take advantage of a splendid offer, chat about a favorite golfer who shot a triple-double to win a rodeo or cannot abide silence I have never understood the NEED to have a cellphone. On a pragmatic basis it is perfectly convenient that when pinned down under a heavy cross fire to be able to order out a pizza but the idea that somehow you have a answer a half-down calls because 2 people cannot remember or write down you are meeting at 1:45 and not 5:41seems downright ridiculous. My work frequently involves coordinating routine movements among 25-30 people and if I am juggling calls among 2 dozen people I never have time to actually do the substantive tasks I am paid to do because I am always sorting out schedules. None of this is impossible but it is unproductive, distracting, and caters to those willing to waste the time of others rather than exercise discipline. Because landlines tend to be less accessible one actually have to think about managing time and space. Grocery shopping behind someone tied by a cellphone to the breakfast acquisitions managing director trying to decide whether the gluten-free $4.29 version is preferable to the $5.09 vitamin-enriched special leaves one wondering when buying a promotional package of something became a team activity coordinated by cellphone.
2
We had a party line when I was a kid, so not only did you have to wait to get home to make a call, but you had to wait until the neighbors were off their phone! I remember my sister and I listening in on our neighbor Shirley discussing with a friend what she was going to wear to a dance.
1
Ooma.
I had it for years, and used its service to have phone service over the internet, with the same feel and dependability as Ma Bell.
(Ok, better)/
I have no financial interest in the company, and today have a cell phone, but if someone were interested in returning to landline days, it is possible to do it over the internet.
Not sure our brains have evolved from millions of years of small tribe connections to be able to handle being linked and available to a much larger tribe all the time.
Problem for me is that I use my phone for music and podcasts, and of course the camera, so being connected is...my downtime.
Hugh
Thank you from a retired Verizon Landline company the one who financed Verizon Wireless. I still have my Landline as do my retiree Bell Tel friends. I always say you just cant have ameaninful conversation on a cell phone, they are at times a blessing and most times a curse. Thank you for a wonderful Editorial.
6
Certainly less of a change than from no phone existing to land lines.
1
Love the photo, where the phone remained, waiting for use in its special place. My grandparents house had such a place, and the phone was a “party” line. When you picked up the handset to make a call, you might hear a neighbors conversation. If not, you inserted your index finger into the dial and rotated it round for 7 numbers. It was a tactile experience we no longer have, with an anticipation for connection as the dial went round and audibly clicked off the numbers of the rotation.
Don’t get me started on the IBM Selectric typewriter, which younger generations can not even fathom.
9
Certainly less of a change than from no phone existing to land lines.
I will always keep my landline. I live alone with dogs & cats & in case of a fall or illness, I believe I have a chance to get to a landline, I have 3 in different rooms, pull on the cord & get the phone down to me. My cellphone could be on a kitchen counter or someplace where I have no way of reaching it.
My late mother had a landline with again 3 phone locations, a cell & a lifeline alert system & during her numerous illnesses & falls, she still always went for the landline to call for help. I'm 71 & a believer in landlines still.
5
I only have land lines, at home and at work. Navigating the work world without a cell is challenging, but possible. I teach at a college; students used to think my lack of one insane, but now some ask how I broke the habit. Trick is, I never had one, and have no plans to get one. What is old may be new again?
3
The surreptitiously placed photo of Winston Churchill suggests an era we should forget (though not the lessons learned). Many readers will not even recognize him. Two World Wars and a Britain struggling to maintain its global economic empire marked his career. What Churchill, an agnostic, statesman and exceedingly complex and revered -- and grumbled over -- political figure in Britain has to do with nostalgia for landlines I'm not sure.
His career spans the era where Europe annihilated itself not once, but twice, calling into question in the modern era the entire project of Western Civilization, and those who still believe it to be civil.
I don't hear Cohen at all arguing for a return to anything characteristic of that period. The modern era certainly does admit to a certain fall from elegance, tradition and the image of a dark-suited man posing for a photo in a wood-paneled repository, cigar in hand and stern look on face.
Like some sort of modern day Tevye, Cohen seems to have lost his home and been cast adrift by the post-modern age. I think we can all feel the loss of something, but exactly what we've lost isn't all that clear.
But we've definitely paid a price for this thing we call "civilization," a tenuous international agreement to not slander and kill one another too frequently, with communication patterns coalescing around two main variants: the irrelevant and the weponized.
I do like the soft green glow of the lamp though.
1
I use my land line. I keep my mobile device turned off. These are the reasons.
It can be done. If I really need to call someone when away, I can quickly enough turn on my mobile device. Every few days, maybe once a week, I do.
7
@Mark Thomason,
You are not alone, and if I kept my emergency mobile device open to calls, it would be a source of disruption, with a bevy of spam calls.
During the last presidential elections the land line started having a party, with a call from Arizona all the way to Alaska. Never had I enjoyed such popularity and I decided to call the phone company. It was a question of resolving how not to be kept awake by The United States of America.
The representative of the above company at 10:00 p.m. was patient and sounded tired. Asking for an explanation of whether these state calls should be ignored, I added that while not wishing to sound like a sad mop, a circle of friends had diminished with the passing of years. She brightened up. What was that about being a 'sad mop', she asked, and we started to laugh merrily, and in tune.
Having just retrieved my outdoor coat, I notice that the cell has gone into the washer to keep it company. O, well, and referring to 'Ellen''s comment posted earlier, the cat and dogs in residence are not going to help in case of a mishap.
Daydreaming continues.
1
I still have a landline but its been crackling up a storm. When i found out that someone else in my area did I figured the phone company was trying to get rid of it. I rue the day it went from copper lines to fiberoptic because the copper lines had enough charge to work during power outage . My mother was able to call us after hurricane Wilma hit Florida.
3
And before the landline, we had the telegram, and before that, we had the post. You want to pine for something that we have a chance of getting back? Pine for the cursive, handwritten letter. We sent our kid to a summer camp in Canada that had a no electronics policy. Our only communication was by post. I still have those letters she sent home, between the ages of ten and eighteen. To hold them in your hand, to see the handwriting of a twelve year old talking about the weather of a long ago summer, is so immediate and magical.
Write more, talk less.
14
Another great Cohen column. While certainly offering convenience, technology is, for me now long since retired, in large part merely time compression equipment. Though in constant contact and with GPS precision, we're going so fast we now have little time for each other, no real recollection of where we've been, and absolutely no idea where we're going.
9
The last time power went out from a hurricane it was down for 14 days in my neighborhood on Cape Cod. No cell, no computer. My landline was one of only two on my street. Guess who called in the downed electrical wires. I loath paying the exorbitant monthly costs. Then I think of the 14 days. Finally Verizon is maintaining them somewhat. I think fear of elderly legal action drives this. So when the electrical grid goes down, I will apparently be (if the Central Office stays on) part of local security. Then again, I am thinking of leaving. Cell service was even better in the EU.
I'm retired so have no overwhelming need to talk to anyone other than my wife. I have a cell phone but rarely use it and even when I take it with me I neglect to turn it on much to my wifes's chagrin. She uses her cell phone exclusively for "texting" and actually talking.
Our landline is used daily -- unfortunately 99% of the incoming calls are robocalls but an answering machine deals nicely with that annoyance.
If Trump and the Congress wanted to do something REALLY useful they'd pass a law imposing life sentences on robocallers.
Our old, black rotary phone sits gathering dust in the cellar, an artifact of a quieter time.
4
Not just a landline. A corded phone with a real dial. I'm sitting right next to one now--a 1960s-era AT&T model. And I don't have to dig in the couch to find it when I want to make a call.
9
I recall reading the book Summer of ‘42 and noting how few ways you could interact with the outside world. I have no desire to go back that far but as a child I recall with fondness being outside with neighbor kids, playing by myself or just daydreaming.
Of course in summer I drove my mother crazy complaining about boredom while she ironed and watched The Edge of Night. She’d tell me to go away and find something to do. It required creativity and self reliance to fill free time. But can you imagine having nothing better to do than reading a book?
7
I leave my cell phone at home when I go out. It's really quite simple.
2
Fortunately, where I live in Vermont, we do not get cell reception. We need to drive one mile to "get a signal." Since I am of the land line age, I love it. I, nor my wife, own smartphones. We each have a rudimentary cell for auto emergencies. Otherwise, we get calls just as we did for decades. Life is, I believe, far better without.
I know this is easily seen as foolish, as denying progress, etc. I see it as humane and human.
Each time I see a couple in a restaurant gazing at their respective phones rather than each other, I know I am correct.
13
Robocalls destroyed the landline. I would still have one if not for those non stop interruptions. The breakup of Ma Bell started the downward trend of no landlines. It's expensive to maintain the copper wire quality sound of hardline communications.
7
As a retired broadcaster, I miss the sound quality of a land line. Cell phone audio quality is a joke, because the cell companies squeeze every Hertz out of the system to allow maximum usage.
But I too dropped my landline because the telemarketers and robo calls killed it.
In time, I’m sure these viruses on society will catch up to cell technology. Then that will be ruined too.
2
Landlines remain a necessity in many rural households. Our smartphones sit in the car, ready for road trip emergencies.
7
Landlines may seem old-fashioned to anyone under the age of forty but their reliability was immense-they very rarely went down during a hurricane, blizzard, etc. Verizon forced the hand of many customers to hang on to them by refusing to fix them if there was a problem. I think at some point there may be a huge weather event or cyber attack that may knock out phone for weeks or months and only then, after chaos and unnecessary deaths, will "old fashioned" landlines come back in some way.
11
PERFECT! I loved the landline life, too- a simpler, friendlier time-
I brought my newer land line phone 300 miles north to a new home this summer and requested that people try me on the land line first.
Don't even get me started on my old bedroom Princess phone in the 1970's...
7
My mobile phone is essentially a landline. Three years ago, I had the service carrier remove texting and voice mail. I have no contacts stored on the phone, and yes, you can still buy inexpensive address books. I have a book with me to read in waiting rooms. My phone does not leave the house with me—ever—even when I travel. Data collection organizations have no idea where I go. People can wait; my life cannot. We don't need a return to landlines in order to reclaim what we had back then. We need only courage, resolve, and imagination.
5
We use our landline regularly. The fidelity and reliability are much better, and I hope we never have to get rid of it. I will use a cell phone when in a pinch--on the road--but almost never at home. I feel clear out of touch with the author and the rest of you on this subject. Maybe it goes back to being born in 1940 and having an old time, rural party line. But I don't think so, I just like the technology of the landline better.
1
At 79 i still don't have a cell. Technically, that's a lie. I do have a cell phone, sitting there in its charger; but i don't have minutes. Who needs minutes when the phone's purpose is simply to dial 911? I put the phone in my car when i drive solo to New Orleans (from Baton Rouge) in case i get car trouble. The phone is my daughter's idea; no minutes, my idea. Of course, i only use the cell when driving to NO solo, which ain't normally the case. So, for practical reasons, my cell is a little, hardly noticed piece of sculpture in a dark part of the room.
1
I'm deaf. Calls from a cell phone are of much poorer sound quality I often cannot understand the caller or even identify who is calling me. If they can call me back on a land line, we can have a conversation. "Please, call me back on a landline!"
9
I'm in my late 60s and I still use my landline every day. My cell phone number is shared only with my family. The landline number is given to others. The audio quality of my landline is far better than that of my cell phone, and therefore better for an aging veteran gradually losing his hearing. My landline phone doesn't require a magnifier to see the numbers I want to dial and the characters on the keys of my landline phone are never washed out by bright sunlight. Important conversations with doctors, lawyers, and businesses are never interrupted by broken wireless connections. My landline won't ever be compromised by a skimmer at a gas station or my personal data stolen via a nearfield encounter with some nefarious passerby. I will never lose, or drop-and-break, my landline and have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to replace it. My landline doesn't have a battery that will die when I most need to connect. And as I've completely avoided being conditioned with the Fear-Of-Missing-Out (if I'm not constantly and instantly reachable via a cell phone leash), I'm less anxious and I sleep better; without guilt and whenever I feel like it.
9
Living deep in a rural area in northern Vermont, we lose electricity a couple of times every winter during bad snow and ice storms. The outages can last from a few hours to, at worst, a few days. We have no cell service. A real landline is a necessity for us because it rarely goes down during these storms and gives us a lifeline to emergency services and the rest of the outside world.
9
I went to college in the early seventies. The dorm had a room I shared with someone I had never met before and the only phone was on the wall in the hallway. One phone for 30 teenagers. We survived. Later on in my too long college career I lived in a house in the country with 3 other people and we had a party line! We shared the phone with people that we didn't know who lived in another house and still I survived. Now I have a cell phone and still keep a landline. I have 2 phone numbers and I'm called by robots. I'm not sure if it's better.
7
Fortunately, we have a choice. I am a Millennial (or at least on the X-Y cusp) and an adjunct professor of educational technology, and I choose not to live an ever-connected yet fundamentally disconnected life. I still eat two meals each day with my family, and I pop in on my neighbors for tea or coffee on a regular basis. (My neighbors pop in on me as well.) And my three children still make most of their ‘playdates’ without any electronic intervention on my part or the part of their friends’ parents. (I admit the advantage of living in a small village, where there is no reason to worry about letting the children play out-of-doors until supper time.) I own a smartphone, which I turn on when I am out and about in case of emergency, but I otherwise do not use it — and I certainly do not text. (To me, this seems equivalent to using a powerful computer to send messages in Morse code.) I chat with my family and friends regularly by landline, and my students and clients are given my landline number and my email. I provide my cell number only to those closest to me. I imagine that if I made myself available, via that little brick, twenty-four-by-seven, that brick would rapidly become an electronic prison of sorts. Honestly, I think there is some irony in lamenting a problem that one actively creates and perpetuates. If you don’t want to be prisoner to an electronic brick, then choose to become its master, rather than allowing it to master you. And consider getting a landline.
4
When I go out to eat I see couples talking and texting on their cell phones rather than talking with each other. I see people at concerts recording the performance rather than listening to it. When I'm walking on the wooded trails near my home I hear people on their phones making business deals rather than taking in the natural beauty that surrounds them. Smart phones are an awesome technology but isn't there a time and a place and a function. At home I always use the land line because I really want to listen. On cell phones its more about what you want to say than about what you want to hear. There's a kind of narcissistic quality to it me thinks.
6
Still remember my family's first phone number, JE 6404 a two-digit prefix named after Thomas Jefferson, followed by four random numbers. Also remember the numbers of all my friends as well as their addresses. Back then, other 'exchanges' were named after other presidents, popular trees and various neighborhoods. Then came the '1' which fit between the prefix and the other numbers. The phone itself was a hefty black paperweight that was virtually indestructible and never portable. We felt privileged in having that number all to ourselves instead of having to share it with others in what was called a 'party line.'
Then came the buttons, which pushed out the rotary dial by pushing us into the future. And the phone became a fashion statement in a range of sizes, models and flashy colors. As 'telephony' morphed and morphed into pocket-sized devices capable of landing a man on the moon, everybody hailed it as the 'modern' way to bring us all closer together. Too close, IMHO.
4
There are few things I hate more than talking on a cell phone. Compared to a "landline," a cell phone is like 2 tin cans and string. So, I'm keeping my landline and if I need to make a call when I'm home, I use the landline. And don't get me started on texting. A quick phone call is about 100 times more effective as a means of communication than a string of text messages.
Now, if they could only fix that telemarketer/robocall problem ....
9
I had a flip phone only for a few years, and have never
owned a smartphone. I am already connected to the internet 5-6 hours a day at home reading the newspaper, emailing, Tweeting, etc, and simply do not want to devote more of my life to that. The reliability of cars today is such that you don’t really need a mobile phone for auto breakdowns. We use our landline exclusively, but robocalls have made owning one excruciatingly painful.
3
This evokes many memories. I remember how lovely making calls from the "phone room" in my college sorority house was; a sun-filled private room where I would call my parents on its basic black (rotary) phone on Sundays. I also remember the baby blue princess phone that my friend's teenage sister had in the 60's that I truly coveted! And I am old enough to remember "party lines!" Run THAT one by your grandkids!
Alas, times change, things change. But I ultimately gave up my landline not because of a cell but because the phone charges were ridiculous, and also because the landline numbers were public and published, and telemarketers and scammers became unbearable. The phone companies created their own demise, unfortunately.
1
This one made me a laugh. My expertise is in the telecom "arts." Over the course of time I found myself one of the minions who help breathe life into the 'Net as it is today. A world which really sits on top of an infrastructure of wires and physical connections, the bones of the land line.
In any case although like everyone else I live, these days, in the province of the wireless I still keep a land line into my home. Why? Call it paranoia. I think of it as low cost insurance.
Disasters or wide-spread power outages do happen, and that old land line? It tends to survive and function where wireless tech winks quickly out.
John~
American Net'Zen
1
I finally ditched my landline when my provider removed the copper wires in favor of fiber optic. Pretty soon I ditched them, too. At least it’s easier to screen junk calls.
@John Is your landline a "POTS" line (i.e., "plain old telephone service")? Where I live, you can't get those anymore. All you can get is VOIP. So, even my landline is tied to the internet.
1
@Imbrod: HA! Good point about the junk. I keep mine, but don't even have anything plugged into it. It's terminates to a phone jack. That's it.
On occasion, though, I will plug in an old phone to make sure I can still pull dial tone. But that's it. You can call me an "old fart." Heh! It's just there as a final life-line in the event of need. It's cheap insurance (to me).
Having lived thru the north-east power failure, the knocking down of the Twins, etc., long ago made me cognizant of the potential need.
John~
American Net'Zen
Dear Lord, yes. I've witnessed a steady devolution in kids' attention span in classrooms during the past decade. It's a constant battle to keep them off of their phones, get them to put their phones in "sleeves" in the front of the classroom, or leave them in an accessible part of their pack. Understandably, kids being kids - they find a way around the rules, and I'm not about to frisk them. Most disconcertingly if you look at what they're swiping up, it's inane drivel. A scientist who recently visited my classes asked the kids where (from what source) do they typically get their news. The kids silently looked around with expressions on their faces that conveyed "News? We don't look at news". And these were good students. Honors level students. No wonder the Trump administration can say anything they want to and have folks believe it.
8
And if people set aside their cell phones, presidential tweets would have less impact. As a result, we would have a healthier and more virtuous country.
13
Your observations confirm why I don't have a cellphone. Friends think we're quaint. I figure our blood pressure is lower.
7
The robo-callers have ruined the land-line. I keep mine in 'leave-a-message' mode. Why bother keeping it? a) My wife hates to use the cell-phone, so turns on the landline to call out. b) in a massive civil disaster it provides (perhaps, maybe) an extra means of getting help.
4
I've only recently become a (reluctant) regular cell-phone user and (hand-me-down-from-my-young-daughter) iphone owner... WITH MUCH ADO in our family.
Our family's land-line number? "Double-one-nine-five," thank you very much Roger!
3
Never once did I feel compelled to answer my land line and talk endlessly and loudly while sitting in a restaurant.
I miss those days.
22
I still have and use my landline as my primary phone number. My recently updated TracFone does just fine at providing me the ability to make and receive important calls when I’m not at home. I refuse to be tethered to a smart phone.
10
I love this as I love landlines and my freedom to connect when I want not when the cellphone wants. But once I was glad to have a cell phone. I was in an unfamiliar city, without knowledge of the language when I fell and smashed my arm very badly. Taken to the trauma section of the university hospital I handed them my phone where all my health issues were mentioned with my medication. The team of doctors were able to contact my doctor and set up the operation within hours. Without this information on my phone I might have lost my arm.
4
Such a nostalgic look at a past part of life. Why not romanticize the party line phone system? Doris Day and Rock Hudson starred in a movie about it. How about the horse and buggy, a nice slow way to get around the city? Forget about the streets and sidewalks (if there were any) being covered in horse apples.
I recently got rid of my land line, the only reason I had it was due to rules I had to have one in case I was being called out for some emergency.
The fantastic advances of civilization because of the computer and communication device you can carry are wonderful. If you do not want to use it fine. Mine is usually tucked in my purse, more than occasionally with dead batteries.
I still use fountain pens and typewriters because I like to. I also use cursive when I write Christmas cards, which I mail using postage stamps.
But do not try to tell me that a dead car on the side of the road at midnight miles from home and no way to reach help is worth living in the era before the cell phone.
5
I had been out of Nam about a week or so and was sitting next to a phone. It took several rings before I looked down and remembered that I was supposed to answer it. It was nice not lugging a radio around so people could talk to each other; however, it seems like they really over do it these days.
1
Many of the old landline phone numbers, mine and those of some of my friends, are indelibly etched in my brain. I find them very useful as strings of numbers for part of passwords. I don’t even know my own children’s cell phone numbers now because of auto dialing. I recently wrote a few critical numbers down to keep in my purse in case of emergency.
6
Waxing nostalgic, huh? Some people hustled when they had land lines. They worked multiple jobs and took care of their families and put themselves through school and stayed active in their communities. They ran small businesses and exercised.
I understand the author’s point about the changes that cell phones have brought to our modern daily interactions with each other, but let’s not get crazy. Life was slower for those who could afford it.
It is a shame that upon the break-up of ATT that the Baby Bells were permitted to keep both wireless and landline businesses.
These models should have been required to compete with each other. Had this occurred, who knows what innovative services might have evolved based on a landline business model.
As it stands, service providers have never had any incentive to protect and enhance our landline paradigm.
4
Years ago, I heard my niece remark that she had "dialed" a number. When I asked her if she had any clue as to how that term originated, she was stumped.
2
This is a wonderful trip down memory lane by Roger Cohen. Those of us who are his age or older have similar nostalgia for the landline telephone. Today, even after completely bundling our cell phone service with a cable provider, we kept our “home telephone number” with several phones sitting in charging bases around the house. It’s workable, but we seldom use those phones for outgoing calls.
In the 1940s and 1950s the rotary dial telephone sat on a table in an honored spot in every house, anchored by its cord. Next to it always was a pad and pencil to write down messages. It was not until later that homes had “answering machines” to receive and store messages.
The progress in telephone equipment and services over the years has been generally good, but it came with a price, as Roger Cohen points out. There has been a reduction in genuine human interaction and, conversely, fewer chances for escaping unwanted connectivity.
The vignette of Mr. Cohen explaining to his son how people managed to rendezvous in a public place without cell phones is hilarious: “you arranged to meet a friend at a certain place at a certain time and you showed up.”
14
Up to the 1980s my family farm in rural Pennsylvania had a party line, one where the number of rings indicated which house should answer. This involved a certain trust of neighbors not to evesdrop. I loved using it but sadly the local phone company announced they could no longer maintain it and replaced it with conventional service.
Sad, but nothing lasts forever.
1
All I get on my landline now are scam calls. I don’t even answer it anymore.
4
Actually, land lines and dial tones are not such a thing of the past, I use a land line and hear a dial tone every work day of my life, sits on my desk at work. And our admin person who answers our main work line, and is just as inquisitive as any parent of teens, knows exactly who is calling one.
2
Land lines?
When I was growing up, we had a PARTY LINE. We had to be careful not to say anything too private because we shared our line with a very nosey neighbor down the line and she was often listening in. This was why in small towns, everyone knew everyone's business. I was a teenager before we got a private line.
And yes, I do miss dial tones. I can still hear the exact tone. And the clicks as our old rotary phone dialed numbers.
I can still remember those old phone numbers. My mother is becoming demented now, but even she can still remember those numbers.
8
Our landline rang just as I finished this article. In the villages the cell phone connections are hit and miss so we all keep the landline for proper communication. Recently we had to call the cable company for a problem with our service. How could you be on the phone for 45 minutes using a cell? The very thought is a nightmare. Thanks for reminding me of the dial tone…you don’t know what you miss until it is gone. So use that landline if you still have one…it will keep you grounded (forgive the pun),
8
I keep my landline because it was the only phone that worked during Hurricane Sandy.
Also, I am told, a call to 911 on a landline requires less routing and so is more efficient.
However, in case of an accident, whenever I drive, I always keep my cell phone handy and charged and maintain a roadside membership, as well.
I have found that GPS has also given me the ease to find new places.
And I like that my family can text me anytime there is important news to share, and takes only a few words.
To keep my time my own, though, I usually let my answering machine take landline messages, thus avoiding numerous scam calls. Their pitch and caller ID have gotten so sophisticated that I am sure they snare a great many trusting souls.
The money must be good for them to continue.
Phone companies need to do more to prevent these scam calls from getting through, perhaps by charging prohibitively high rates to those making more than the predicted number of calls any legitimate business would make.
Perhaps the government needs to make decent laws?
8
@BLB
I suspect that the reason scam calls on landline phones has become such a problem is that many of the people who still have landlines are older. Sadly, older people are often the prey of scammers.
6
@Greenie The scammers target retirement communities by buying or building a phone list they feed into a computer and wait to hear someone pick up or leave a message. Unhappily, they also call businesses and hospitals which is really problematic.
The last community I lived in no one had cell service. At my current residence a land line is required in order to have internet (and, no, it is not dial-up internet) but I do have cell phone service. I wonder how much of America relies on land lines.
2
The article does not discriminate between the old public switched telephone network and fixed voice over internet protocol devices.
While there is no need to keep a PSTN landline, a VoIP one with a fixed number dedicated to one home has many advantages. Many people prefer to communicate their fixed number rather than their mobile phone number.
In France, telecom services offer bundles with internet, TV, a fixed VoIP, and one cell phone. This is why, as it is shown on the map, France is still well equipped with landlines.
8
My landline is my main phone. I reluctantly bought a cell phone when dog/house sitting where someone had disconnected the landline (later found, but it was too late!).
Part of my dislike, then and now, was based on an article in Audubon Magazine about how cell towers killed 1000s of birds...
As for the convenience--yes, it's great for emergency contacts and taking impromptu photos.
But 'non-stop talk, all the time' or even just the sight of nearly every Cal student on the bus texting or phoning, depresses me.
The apparent lack of reflection (in a non narcissistic sense) is disturbing. And as for the other types of narcissism--I wonder if in some ways the bipartisan narcissism of 'wired' life had some Jungian, psychological 'cause' for Trump? (Only half facetious) 8-{
11
Nice article, Mr. Cohen... but -- who's mourning for the "lost" landline? Out here where I live in the reaches of northern New England, where cellphone coverage can be spotty and power outtages during winter storms a fairly common occurrence, a sizeable portion of us still have and use landlines on a daily basis. And appreciate them.
When power is out for two or three days, and you're keeping warm with the woodstove and soup and coffee heated on it, and your cellphone's battery is on failing life support, it's great to know that the local fire department and EMT can be reached via landline. Wouldn't be without it!
24
@Jimbo
Yes, in a recent storm the place where I was petsitting lost power and the cell tower lost theirs shortly after. Cell service was out for about 3-4 days. Had they had a landline that would have been so useful as I had zero ways to communicate with anyone.
8
Two advantages of a landline: If the power goes out, there is enough juice in telephone lines to power a telephone (sorry, this does not apply to cordless phones). Also, 911 can find you much more easily with a landline.
14
Until the end of the 1980s when travelling Europe I had to find a Post & Telecommunications where I would pre-pay a phone call to let my parents know I had arrived safely. Or I would send a brief telex, to minimize cost.
Not just landlines, but paper maps. I am old enough to remember us driving thousands of kilometers from the north of Europe to the sun in the south (Italy, Spain, France) before there were highways, on slow two-lane roads, using a large cumbersome paper map. This involved careful planning and multiple stops to check where we were, as well as good navigating skills by the front seat passenger, to help the driver drive. A picnic was essential as finding places to eat could be tricky and hundreds of miles away.
My father had an almost religious interest in antique maps, and had a wall full of these framed and displayed at home.
My young adult children had no interest in learning how to use a map, seeing it as archaic and unnecessary outside the occasional, quaint, orienteering as scouts. Having lived as an expat in South Asia recently, nor did the many professional trained drivers we used there have any idea how to navigate using a paper map, relying almost blindedly on GPS; and if the place did not exist on GPS, it certainly wasn’t worth going there.
Should there ever be an internet glitch, I hope enough of us who still know how to navigate a paper map will be available to guide the younger generation, provided there are still old paper maps available.
7
Having dinner with a friend before cell phones in shared conversation.
Now who hasn't finished a meal waiting for that friend to ignore a text or finally tell the person on the cell they are having dinner with someone and finally hang up.
So many advantages with cells, but many things to miss.
4
It's not just phones. I'm from Brooklyn, from the years before TV. We used to go outside and play in the streets after dinner, and the grownups would come outside and talk to each other while keeping an eye on us. We knew all our neighbors--what they did for a living, what problems they were having. Then TV came to the block and people stayed inside to watch the screen. Nobody knew their neighbors anymore. The streets were deserted, threatening.
Cell phones are a godsend in emergencies, but in other ways they atomize society even further. I see young couples walking down the street, each on his or her cell phone, texting people who aren't even there.
6
I still remember when Caroline had to trudge to my cave entrance and grunt my name so we could play. There was not work back then, no school, and we could daydream all day and die in our late 20s.
2
In the great Northeast Blackout in 1962, I remember that the one thing other than cars and buses and veterans, in NYC which kept on working, faithfully, was the old Ma Bell,(AT&T), dial phone system. I found that what we had come to take for granted in the US, was that our telephones-great, big ,unwieldy ,( almost useful to hammer nails, too!), was that the system had it's own electrical system. This meant that though a gasoline station or grocery store might shut without power"our" phones-even public phones,(not the electric lights), kept on working. Blacked out-sitting about a candle or lamp, eating whatever was on the table or in a warming fridge,(did the Gas work?), we found we'were be able to call ones parents or family, all but everywhere our phones conncted to. This was a of inestimable value and since then, I have refused to abandon hard wired "land liness" though I now know they can't keep working like Ma Bell's black beauties. This was a reason for the ARPANET=(internet precursor)= So that if atomic bombs knocked out power-our computers and phone lines might still work in many places in the country, maintaining governemtn, military and economy.
A return to a powered, human operated "land-line"phone system would be a good "first step" to the time when we were in control of our technology-not the tech in control of us.
6
As a child on a Vermont farm, I remember our « party line, » when we’d stand at the phone hanging on the wall, pick up the receiver, only to hear a conversation taking place. Waiting for their conversation to end. Then picking up the receiver again, ringing by hand to get the operator (Mr Foote, in « downtown » Pawlet VT) and asking him to ring Mrs Herrick. « I just saw her down here, so you can’t get her right now, Mr Foote said. « Thanks, Mr Foote. I’ll try her later. » And then out to the garden, to pick some peas for dinner. Those were the days of the 1940s . . .
4
I gave up on my landline because I got so many scam phone calls that I stopped answering it...oops, now that's my cell phone that's getting them.
I expect when the telephone became popular, letter-writing was mourned, and when the train, the week- or month-long visits. It's true things keep speeding up. We can only try to trust ourselves to hang onto our truest nature, passing through this endlessly revolving kaleidoscope of human experience.
11
I still have my landline, the same number for 25 years. I have my cable TV, my Internet and my landline all hooked in together and my landline is free so I decided to keep it. Even though I am on the do not call list I get many spam phone calls. My iPhone has become my main phone and I use my landline when I have trouble with my iPhone. To keep the spammers away, my landline is off the hook. I was looking in the closet for something and came across a rotary dial phone. That’s showing you my age. You can buy a contraption that will convert the four prong Landline into a one prong that will access your phone line. I actually tried it and made a call using the rotary phone. It was wonderful that two people could speak at the same time and understand each other as opposed to an iPhone where only one person can speak at a time. I hate that only one person can talk because that person can go on and on. With a land line they can’t do that. As far as technology goes we do lose some advantages along the way.
3
@New York Person It is not a landline, it is voice over Internet, and depends on electricity to work. It is not over copper.
1
I'm firmly in the camp of landline lovers.
My Italian friends, many of whom confess that they have become slaves to their cellphones, are envious that I don't carry one. But I have no reason to be accessible at all hours, and prefer to be unencumbered by the distraction that cellphones have become.
I do own one (purchased by a travel companion when we visited Roma a dozen years ago, and retained by me when I moved here permanently), but it's what I call a stupidphone, as it does nothing but make a receive phone calls and text messages. It lives at home. I pour a few euros into it annually to keep it active, and recharge it when the battery is low, but that's about it. I rarely give out the number as I can't be reached on it when I'm out and about. I'd be tempted to do away with it completely were it not for the fact that I need it to receive codes to access my Italian bank account, which is something new this year.
The hardest thing about not using a cellphone is explaining to others why I am giving them the number of my landline or my email address. And that turns out to be not hard at all.
8
Still use our landline although it is now an ooma phone. Much cheaper for international calls, and better sound quality. Nice to have an extra number..
I am happy to admit that I still have and use my beloved landline. It's far superior for real heartfelt conversations, with its clear reception, and no interruptions.
Landlines are for meaningful communication..
Cell phones are for reaching out between the spokes of the fast-turning wheels of life.
7
Without any wish to one-up a wholesome young man, I must tell you that I remember party lines. At least, my grandparents were on one during the early years of the world. Imagine a sort of guerrilla teleconferencing without the picture or the certain knowledge that you had shed your privacy.
Elsewhere on the landline front:
A quarter-century ago, there was a popular romantic movie about a young woman and man who strike up an acquaintance aboard a train traveling across Europe. Someone on a film website commented that it couldn't happen today; they'd both be engrossed in their phones the whole time.
Like you, we have a landline. We intend to keep it, because we've learned that a landline can be a lifeline during natural disasters and other emergencies, where we are. Even if the cellphone system remains physically undamaged, it's liable to crash under the weight of people calling to check on each other's safety. And if something knocks out electric power for a day or more, cellphones start turning into paperweights as they lose their charge.
Landline phones and operator-assisted calling also enriched the contemporary culture with items like Paul Villard's touching story, "Information, Please" and, for a wholly different type of tearing-jerking, the classic "Telephone" routine by Mike Nichols and Elaine May. At one time, we'd have had to run down to the library or a used-record shop and try to dig these things up. Now, happily, we can just pick up our phones and Google them.
4
Well maybe the landline can’t go away! The cell service on Verizon between Grosse Pointe and Downtown Detroit is very unreliable for those of us that live on or near the Detroit River. Verizon has provided me with many creative excuses for this lack of service yet I pay the full price for dropped calls, erroneous messages indicating the VM is full, and no cellular data service. They attempted to test the connectivity to the three towers near me which I can see and one is a half a block away. I did not connect to any of these but my phone did connect to the servers at Rocket mortgage six miles away and Wayne State about 8 miles away. Their parting advice to me “Don’t get rid of your land line and maybe try a different cell provider!
1
It took a long time for me to get used to the fact that I would call someone and the first thing I would ask would be "Where are you?"
In the (good) old days, the "callee" would either be in the kitchen (where most phones were) or in one of the bedrooms, where there was an "extension." Today, I can call anyone from anywhere, and the anywhere can be . . . anywhere on this planet (or probably soon, on another planet).
Another thing: Ever notice how on TV or in the movies, everyone seems to have perfect reception? None of this "Speak up!" or "Please keep the phone closer to your mouth," or "I can only hear every other syllable!"
Yes, my husband and I still have our treasured landline; only one of our four kids still has one, but if we call it there will be no answer because 9 out of 10 times they'll have no idea where it is.
4
Roger's landline has one of those new-fangled charger beds! I do a landline phone the proper way, with hard wired hand set and the phone plugged into the wall. I'm not a total dinosaur, however - it is push button, not rotary dial.
4
Another Californian lamenting the loss of landlines. Mine was lost after 20 years, because I was forced to move, and found my new area had gone fiber-optic. So AT&T made that decision. Meanwhile, our power company, PG&E, unilaterally decided to turn off the power at random times during fire season, because they hadn’t updated their lines, to prevent fires. But when power is out (sometimes for days), cell phones may not work, VOIP won’t work, and fiber optic phones won’t work. So where is our Public Utilities Commission?
11
I'm at a point of scheduling cell phone usage like the way I scheduled picking up my voicemails and checking email at work. It interferes with getting things done. It's a procrastinator and a distractor and not very satisfying in either respect. It's immediacy also facilitates poor communication. I recently did not get exact directions in picking someone up because, well, I could just pull over and text. Which did not happen for a number of reasons. With a landline, I collected all the necessary info. prior to meeting someone. Better organization, better communication, better use of time, better traveling and most of all, better relations because it is essentially more respectful. How we show up in the world matters.
6
An early adopter of technology, this senior is a refusenik when it comes to cell/smartphones. All you have to do is watch the zombies everywhere to understand this is not a good thing. I may, in the end (it's getting closer) have to get one, but I will hold out as long as I can. Why is everyone so eager to enslave themselves, I asked years ago. I still have no idea.
13
My copper connection was decommissioned by Verizon 2 years ago, so my home "land line" is actually voice-over-IP on fiber. But it is still my phone of choice both for making and receiving calls. I still flinch when I hear someone's cellphone ringing in a store or on the street. Some people seem to have no notion of personal privacy, especially at the supermarket checkout.
4
I am an engineer who started my career when designers worked on drawing boards and in notebooks. People met in meeting rooms, corridors, around each others desks, in the tea room. There was continuous conversation and face to face interaction. Ideas thrived, and were discussed in meeting rooms with overhead projectors, where one drew outlines on a piece of transparent plastic, erased them by hand, and redrew. My career progressed to a point where engineers sit hunched over computer screens all day, use complex software without which they cannot design, have computerised meetings without moving from the desk, communicate by email only, spend the better part of an hour each morning answering emails, are expected to pick up and answer every email....then go home in the evening barely having looked anyone in the eye...as a project manager I tried to change this, knowing how important human interaction is in the engineering world...I barely made an indent....I cant help but remember how American engineers sent people to the moon in the age before personal computers, using what I guess I must call "old fashioned" engineering principles...Elon Musk seems to be succeeding now where so many are failing...I wonder how his engineering companies run....I suspect with a lot of human face to face interaction....
3
I do not have or want a cell phone.
This year I lost my landline when the telephone company switched to VOIP.
Now when the power goes out, which it does fairly regularly, I no longer have phone service and I cannot even call the power company to find out when the power is expected to come back on.
Believe it or not I am not the only one bummed out by this.
8
I miss having a landline. I daydream about getting one installed again someday. I honestly don't like talking on my cell phone at all. I feel like I'm blasting my brain with gamma rays every time. Talking on the phone feels like a lost art in general. I used to talk for hours with friends in the evenings or on the weekends. This piece has me reflecting on all that I've lost in exchange for "smart" technology.
7
I'm untied. I worked for the Dept of Defense and we were not allowed to take our phones into the work area. We either left them in the car or put them in a locker, to be picked up at the end of the day. So I pretty much missed out on the whole attachment craze.
Now retired, it's the only phone I have. I don't carry it around the house with me all day. I check it in the morning, when I take a lunch break and in the evening to see what calls or texts I may have missed. I'm far away enough from it during the day that I don't hear it ring. My family knows they're unlike o get me the moment they call or text. For anything important, someone can leave a message, although I do screen messages and don't return calls from numbers I don't recognize. This has probably saved me from countless scams, especially as a senior citizen.
I do take it when I go out for any length of time and have to admit it's pretty great for navigation.
I'm umplugged most of the time and I like it. To each his own.
3
I wish I still had my land line phone! It kept working after hurricanes - when cell phone traffic was jammed and cell phones not working for days or even longer. I still remember all the long ago land line phone numbers of friends and family, and how expensive long distance calls were. The extra long phone cords so you could take the phone to another room for a longer conversation. So many wonderful memories. I’m sure there were hassles too, I just can’t remember them waxing nostalgic.
1
As a long-time employee of NJ Bell/Bell Atlantic/Verizon, I, too, miss the landline, and I’ll tell you why: During a power outage, you can plug in your landline, and it will be able to draw enough power, so you can still use your phone.
This is very important for senior citizens and others, who must be able to be able to use their phone in case of an emergency. My elderly father refused to use a cell phone, so his lifeline, quite literally, became his lifeline.
I still keep my own landline phone to use in case of an emergency (like when I misplace my cell phone), and it still works — at least in Illinois!
1
I have kept my landline because of the quality of sound. A cell phone talking to another cell phone is torture.
8
Having just a landline means not being tracked by the
secret force. Leave the house, no one will know.
3
I remember being 16 and my father got me a princess phone because I talked for hours on end with my girlfriend every night.
Who even answers the phone anymore? Everyone lets their calls go to voicemail. They call you back at their convenience.
With the smart phone I almost never have conversations with my friends. There seems to be a tacit understanding that calling someone is an intrusion and texting someone is socially appropriate.
Searching for things on google, taking pictures and using applications to make free international calls are all wonderful things but as a way to talk, not so much. 
2
@Michelle Birch I loved my princess phone. I didn't have one when I was a teenager in the late 60s/early 70s but when I got my first apartment in 1976 that's what I bought. A pink princess. And I had that phone up until the mid-90s when it finally broke. I was crushed.
I too love the freeing effect of living without the burden of the (horridly non-ergonomic) mobile phone. I have retained my landline although nobody calls anymore except robocalls, marketers, surveyors and fraudsters. The rest of my family texts so I miss the group "chats." And now many young people are anxious and phobic about holding a live telephone conversation with others. Today "call me" is code for something that should not be texted, or somebody died. Sad.
1
"Time drifted. It was not raw material for the extraction of productivity."
Yes, and it was our time. Make it our time again. The extraction of productivity has been mostly to the benefit and accrual of the few over the many. This is human culture? This is society?
Technological advancement is a double-edged sword. I don't think we're getting the better end of the bargain. Forty years ago there was a movement termed "appropriate technology." Never hear of it now - I suppose it's considered heresy. When it's considered at all...
I miss the lack of cell phones at art museums.
When I was young, I stared at paintings in the Van Gogh Museum or the Uffizi Gallery until they were burned in my visual cortex. Nowadays, at all the major museums, people like me who look at the art are a minority. Many, many simply snap a quick photo -- or a selfie in front of the art -- and move on.
As the fatalistic saying goes, "It is what it is." In other words, who are we to judge the value of looking at art vs. taking a quick selfie in front of it?
Young people today have no idea what Roger Cohen is talking about. Staring out the window at trees, when you could be catching up on Instagram? Daydreaming, when you could be doing a side hustle?
These are the experiences that build the person. Without the landline, there would be no Roger Cohen, and I can therefore safely say that there never will be again. Which makes me profoundly sad.
7
Paintings evoke emotions and memories and thoughts. Not necessarily to just see. Try.attending. art history lectures as they give insight as to message.
1
The landline is far from dead. The largest part of telephone company income was from businesses, and it still is. It will be a long time before major businesses give up the land line to email.
5
LOVE my landline. So easy to slow down, pay attention, speak into and hear clearly. Cellphone is handy for its calendar and texting.
3
I miss the landline phones -- we didn't call them that, of course, they were merely telephones -- because each call was a kind of adventure. You didn't have any idea who was calling -- and how wonderful that was. I'll never forget the Sunday morning when my son called me to tell that his love had run off and gotten married. A complete and delightful surprise!
1
Wait. His love ran off from him and married someone else?
1
I need a land line for my emergency button that calls for help. It’s very necessary as it I fall I cannot get up, Feel safe.
1
I was born the same year Roger Cohen was. Therefore, I know (and just checked to be sure) that Ysatis was introduced after I grew up, in 1984 to be precise. Was Cohen not allowed to take a phone call in his room at 29? But thanks, Roger, for the lovely column and for reminding me of that perfume I wore in my young adulthood!
1
I will be 60 next year. I love my cell phone. On a daily basis I am “with” some of the special people in my life, though we are plane rides apart.
Without a doubt life is more hectic than it has ever been. In my view that is because people have begun to value things more than people, spending money they don’t have and snubbing any person that presents an obstacle in the rat race.
You don’t need at least 50% of what you have. Do without it and the phone can be a wonderful connection with others, rather than an obstacle in the rat race.
80
@K. Corbin -- When I was traveling all over all the time, sure I did this. Now as my daughter is always away somewhere, she does this.
Most of us don't need to do this. It is better if we don't. But it was and is good for the times it fits. It just does not fit everyone all the time, which is the way it is used and abused.
4
@K. Corbin I am 80 now, and I still remember the telephones of the 1940s. (But I have trouble remembering what I did yesterday, until I go to the NYTimes website & read about tRump till I'm desolate & go off to play solitaire, or do a New Yorker jigsaw puzzle.)
8
@K. Corbin
What? You can live without that phone. You did before you got it, and could if it was gone.
Life isn't more hectic, its been made to appear that it is, and that device in your hand is part of the magic show!
What do we do now that we didn't do 30 years ago? And did it really well without these devices? I managed to get to work, earn a living, have a social life (that involved flesh and blood people) have leisure time, enjoy various activities...all without a device in my back pocket.
The cell phone was sold to us, when we didn't even know we truly needed it. Sure, it would have been great to make a call from the car when late and sitting in traffic, and the cell phone solved that minor issue.
Sure making a call or text when food shopping meant not forgetting the thing not on the list. Okay great, we have X on the plate, completing the meal. Stupendous!
But simplifying life was never the goal, but rather getting you to believe that You couldn't live without them was. That a text was "being in touch." (all without the touch) That responding to the notification prompts immediately would be the itch that had to be scratched and was looked forward to having. "I like having this itch, this craving..."
My relationships have not improved since the advent of these devices. In fact, the interactions often come when I least want them. Where now a late response is deemed an insult and/or trigger for a misunderstanding.
Its a tool that has been forced upon us.
23
I still have one, as do my mother and brother. Call us Luddites; I don't care.
My sisters always ask why I do not pick up my cell.
Well, kudos to you NYT. I mainly use it to read the news, then turn it off. Oh, also to cheat on Scrabble and get GPS directions.
I am just old enough to have gone through childhood in the 90s, the setting of leaving the house and truly being "off the grid".
It frightens me that now when kids grow up, they're always plugged in.
130
@Paul Hannahs I voluntarily turn the phone off when I want to be off the grid the way I was until 2001.
12
I also have a longing for my old landline. It was forcibly removed from me by AT&T several years ago. With my landline, I only lost service ONCE in 30 years, during the 1989 quake.
Since I've been forced into the new wifi service, I've lost service EVERY MONTH intermittently for hours or 1-2 days at a time. It's terrible.
I have to pay so much money for intermittent service. I have no idea whether I will be able to get help in an emergency.
I have such fond memories of the landline days.....
272
@sfdphd As an ex Californian, I won't give up my landline (not the cordless kind) precisely because that was the only thing that worked after an earthquake when the electricity was off.
50
@sfdphd I got tired of paying Verizon for landline when I also had a free cable phone. It was redundant. But cable phone won't work in a power outage.
20
@sfdphd 1994, the worst ice storm in southern Maryland history. For 9 days, no electricity, no toilet, no water, no heat. All the poles were down. The ONLY THING that worked were landlines, even though they were lying on the ground. What is the first thing that went during Katrina? The cell towers, and first responders had been fool enough to switch to cellphones, so couldn't communicate. It is no accident that in The Matrix the connection to reality is a land line.
67
I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned the appeal of landlines from the perspective of purely functional design. The handsets are naturally comfortable to hold and have been intentionally designed for use by a human. Cell phones, on the other hand - those small monolithic slabs - are designed to hold as much information as possible without taking the human body into consideration...at all. We do not have squared off planes on our faces where the modern cellphone could comfortable rest.
I'm amazed at the variety of awkward ways people hold and use them. I would have thought that technology would have produced something much better from a design perspective by this time.
394
@C.C. Yeah, but bluetooth headphones make the whole experience rather seamless - the slab is just a computer - use as you will but properly. Even holding a handset to a ear can cause problems.
You could implant receivers in your ears and receive calls directly. :)
3
@C.C.
Your complaint about "monolithic slabs" is great. The design of cell phones may reflect the selfishness of silicon valley in its rejection of ergonomics. Just as Roger Cohen waxes nostalgic for the shape and feel of old landline telephones (as do I), others now yearn for the comfort of holding and using their old flip phones (as do I)
38
@C.C. So THAT'S what those monoliths in "2001: A Space Odyssey" were ... alien cell phones! As I recall, one of them does call back Jupiter in the film.
19
I don't have a cell phone, and I feel sorry for people who do. They seem a terrible burden.
It is very sad that maps are becoming less available, and that cities appear to try saving money by reducing signage giving directions, all because of GPS. I carry a compass.
280
@dairubo
My compass is attached to my backpack. Though I have one on my cellphone too, the backpack is quicker and easier to check. When one emerges from a subway onto an unfamiliar street, it tells you which way to walk.
18
@Blinker
No it doesnt. Not all cities are exactly lined up on a compass. "Uptown" is very often NOT a north heading. Its just been called uptown! Meanwhile the east side is more southside then east side...and west side is truly heading north.
"Here I am the intrepid newbie in a new city...let me whip out my compass, charts and protractor."
Or I could ask someone. What a concept...ask a human who likely lives there how to go where you want to go! Whacky!
8
@dairubo I have a love / hate relationship with the cell phone, but the truth is that once you've become accustomed to doing your banking on the toilet there's no going back.
13
My landline in San Francisco never lost service in the 1989 Loma Prieta quake and I refuse to give mine up, now living in wildfire country with PG&e turning the power off for days at a time. My cell is a useful tool. I'm grateful to be able to afford both.
204
@Janet Rosen You may not have a choice, In my area landlines were discontinued. For years, I resisted Verizon's efforts to get me to give mine up, and then one day they permanently disconnected it.
7
@Janet Rosen It's only a matter of time before you will be forced to give it up as your phone company abandons your "copper" service. It was a legal fight that consumers lost.
4
@KarenAnne The same thing is happening to me. They tried for years to make me give it up and now I don't have a choice. It makes me very angry. My landline phone ALWAYS worked when the power went out. Now Verizon says they will have a battery back up that will work for a day or two. AND if for any reason the battery fails I can replace it for $39.99! Lucky me!!!
10
My landline saved my life when an intruder gained entry into my home. My cell phone was charging in the foyer (where the intruder was), but I had a landline by the bedside. 911 knew where the call was coming from and I didn't have to speak above a whisper for them to find us. I like that a landline is tied to a location and not to a person. No matter what the cost, I will continue to maintain this connection. For the record, i am 42.
593
@Jennifer But, using your reasoning, you can text silently from a cell phone (though not yet to 911). And if I recall correctly, 911 could not obtain your address directly from your land line, whereas you can be tracked through your cell phone (pace the current NYT front page series ...).
3
@Jennifer - Your cell phone is tied to a location quite precisely if you have you have GPS on. In Sweden emergency services reached at 112, the counterpart of 911, has developed an app that if turned on will give the emergency call receiver the exact location.
As concerns ejb's reply I believe what you Jennifer are saying is that since you were calling from a landline, the address of your home was registered but perhaps the 911 person would have to look up the address for that phone.
The new Swedish service would not require that you do anything more than send in the perhaps only few seconds before the intruder appears.
Your landline won't help you, obviously, if your emergency occurs anywhere else than in your home.
The Swedish app is in a still early stage of use but I see that when people file opinions a technician replies with a message and most I have seen are quite helpful.
By chance you do what I ask commenters to this column do, give age. Thanks for that.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Citizen US SE
10
@Larry Lundgren
GPS often doesn't work indoors. In which case, the location you see is based on triangulation with cell towers and WiFi APs.
Sometimes, it's not that accurate.
@ejb
Landlines are tied to specific addresses. In fact, years ago, that was the reason why consumers were told they shouldn't replace their landlines. 911 could find them with landlines from the service address. At that time, it wasn't yet possible for cell phones (we're talking about the ANALOG cell phone days).
17
Several weeks ago I decided to consciously engage in idle chit chat with strangers. I clearly remember the first time iPhones took that kind of communication away for me in a noticeable way. I was on the Acela, waiting on line at the snack bar. There were 8 or 10 people waiting, all on their phones. I missed chatting about which items on the menu were best or the weather or an excitement about a destination. I like my iPhone, but I hated giving up these human interactions for it. Since I began this private mini rebellion, I've found times to intentionally talk to people I don't know when they are not on their phones... on elevators, at the check out counter, while picking up take-out. You should try it! It's been more fun than I had expected it to be.
315
@Suzanne I used to do that a lot when I was younger. I probably annoyed a lot of people but nonetheless I did it since I wanted to be friendly and gregarious. But these days I'm more in loner mode. It's not because of cell phones - more perhaps my family. It's like I'm socially content whereas I previously wasn't.
I still try to be nice to people around me if I do interact with them. I think we all can benefit from appreciating others a bit and acknowledging other people's existence but I don't do more than that.
9
@Suzanne
I talk to folks too. It annoys the bejesus out of my kids!
The funny thing is people are absolutely delighted to talk to you most of the time. Folks are lonely. For the most part, there is nothing all that interesting in their phones that they aren't happy to set them aside and engage with a normal human who is interested in taking a moment to talk to them.
It is only my children who think I am bothersome and boring. Sad thing that. But then, I guess kids are like that.
34
@Suzanne . . .I live alone with my doggie. Everyday I make a point to go out and purchase some little something so I have a brief interaction with another human. Just the exchange about the price of beans, or the weather, or the last customer's attitude makes such a difference. I could call someone, but then I wouldn't have the connection of standing with them somewhere, in that moment in time. I also find walking the dog in public spaces most often results in some chit-chat as she is very cute. No phone can ever do that, land line or no. My grandfather was said to have "never met a stranger!" Guess I got his genes.
40
Reading this column reminds me why I am so grateful to have grown up without the Internet and cellphones in the 70s. We had more time to be alone with our thoughts, to observe and interact with nature and each other. I believe this contributes to a healthier physical and emotional life and a mindful awareness of one's self, others, and the natural world. Despite all their undeniable advantages and amazing capabilities, the constant, addicting distraction of smartphones contributes to our increasingly short attention spans, contributes to incivility (consider our "Tweeter in-chief"), depression, and poor social interaction skills. I often wonder how many people have "plan B," i.e. how to function if and when the power goes off and the network goes down. We've created an unhealthy dependency on wireless technology. Perhaps rather than a fossil from the past, the land line may serve as a future "plan B" corrective to our distracted, addicted world of smart phones.
258
@Steven Dunn
Thank you Steven for your honest representation of thoughts and feelings.
You described my feelings exactly.
People need time to be present in their own world to think and ponder without distraction.
19
@Steven Dunn Thank you, Mr.Cohen and Mr. Dunn.!!! I grew up in the 30's, and 40's, when our (2 party) phones were on a stand and the mouth piece and receiver were a long ways apart, connected with a cord, of course.. As a teenager, we had a closet near-by which I could sneak into if I wanted to have a private talk with a friend. I still have a land line phone and am so glad I do. ! I have to confess that it is very frustrating when my own children come to visit and have their eyes and ears tuned to those smart phones and lap-tops. I feel completely shut out.. No eye contact-- just a "I'm listening, Mom". The human connection was so much better in those days. ! I really enjoy and agree with this Column . Thanks again...
15
I keep a landline. Never answer it. I have an I phone. Never answer it. I get back to callers I know. The intrusions of scammers is out of control. I do miss answering the phone to people who are wanting to connect. You know to just say hello or invite you to dinner. To pick up the phone next to a calendar and write in a date to connect. Those days are gone.
326
@Lake trash --It's a true PITA, but I have to screen all my calls--cell and landline. 90% are robo- or telemarketing calls. I only answer numbers I recognize--if they don't leave a message, forget it. Even my cell now reads "Spam Risk" or "Telemarketer" most of the time.
19
@Lake trash
Ever since my first answer machine, I never answer any phone.
My message says, 'Leave a message', most are deleted without listening
I tell everyone to write a letter, aka email, and never knock on my door, email first with a time and date
I am very busy in retirement!
16
@Lost In America. We must be twins separated at birth.
11
One day a few of the younger grandchildren were here. My landline rang and they all stopped in their tracks and looked around. Too funny. They were clueless. I can't wait to show them the old record player and the really old typewriter. They think I'm 200 years old.
419
Cohen hits on a very significant way cell phones have changed how we relate: the breakdown of your domestic community (family, roommates, etc.) with purely individualistic targeting. Cohen illustrates this much better than I:
"They were, through such random encounters, entwined in the lives of others. My mother might ask afterward, Darling, who’s Caroline?' I could not avoid some response, however evasive."
"The landline was a shared thing. Conversations took place at unplanned moments. Overhearing was unavoidable. I would pull back the net curtain I never liked and gaze out on suburban nothingness. I could not take the call to my room."
"Franklin recalled being mortified at her mother answering when a boyfriend called on the family landline. 'Still, at least then you had some idea who your children were seeing. Cellphones put an end to that.'”
"In the landline world there was down time. You left the house, you looked around, you saw people, you daydreamed, you got lost, you found your way again, you gazed from the train window at lines of poplars swaying in the mist. Time drifted. It was not raw material for the extraction of productivity."
Experience occurred, not as a thing to be rated with stars, nor as the prelude to a request for feedback. Sidewalks were not an obstacle course around people absorbed by smartphones.... Heads were not bowed in contemplation of thumbs. The end of landlines has been bad for necks. It has been bad for the bonds that form the commons.
107
@Steve Fankuchen
The thing I loved MOST about landlines was that when I left the house, people did not expect to reach me 24/7/365 and HOW DARE I NOT ANSWER immediately!!!!
I mean, personally, I pay for my cell phone. No one else does. It's for my convenience. So, if I don't want to answer it, I don't. I leave the ringer off and I don't take calls most of the time.
People used to get really upset about this. How dare I not be available to be reached constantly. Like, I *had* a cell phone, it meant I was to be at their beck and call.
Uh, NO.
41
@Dejah, and people are so astonished if I forget to turn my phone off - which I do whenever with others - and it rings and they say, "Do you need to get that?" and I say no and apologize. The idea that I can wait an hour to check astonishes them. Every call from a child or another friend is now considered so important; children cannot pick a breakfast cereal or find a sneaker without parental input.
17
@Steve Fankuchen, I love your phrase, "Experience occurred, not as a thing to be rated with stars." I noticed people are less available now for experience - to go to a play or brunch - because they are home instagramming or tweeting.
16
I don't get a cell signal at my home and so cannot give up my land line---but I would not do that anyway, even if there was a good, reliable signal. I have a cheapie TracFone to use for emergencies in the car, but otherwise I revel in my "disconnected" time. The land line has an answering machine that screens calls (begone, telemarketers!) and friends know if they leave a message I will get back to them promptly.
Cell phones (and texting) have seriously degraded our communications with one another, in spite of the supposed "added convenience." I personally refuse to text, which annoys some people who now rely on it for "connection," and as a bicyclist, I deeply resent no longer feeling safe riding on the back country roads around my home because of all the careless people texting while driving. One close call was all it took for me to give it up in favor of riding on paved trails. The deterioration of our written discourse is directly related to the current prevalence of texting, and the elegance of well-crafted language in every-day communications is now disappearing. Sadly, most avid cell phone users/texters don't even realize what they've lost in the name of "connectedness."
5
@cfluder: You were never really safe driving with cars. I had a co-worker who adamantly opined that cyclists had no right to be on the road at all. I have also had a couple of close calls while driving in which other drivers were wandering out of their lane (probably from texting, don’t know for sure), and one of them was a Brinks truck coming right at me head-on. Stay safe.
I very much enjoyed this piece. Thank you.
6
Humbug
I recall the utter stress of being stuck in interminable traffic outside of the Lincoln Tunnel while the girl of my dreams was waiting for me in a midtown bar ...There was no cell phone to call her...back then...I was hours late...Never got the chance to explain...
5
lovely thoughts, like your grandfather felt about radio only days in 1950 and his about - not - having a landline in 1925 - and his in 1900 about something
I can raise you one, Roger. Never mind your growing with a rotary phone; when I was being raised in an English home you just picked up the phone and waited for an operator to say "number, please". My parents coached me on how to make my first phone call, and I was put out when the operator told me in a kind but authoritative voice that "there's no need to shout".
Fast forward the best part of eight decades, and I'm still not at home using a mobile phone. I guess I need some coaching from my grandkids.
23:25 EST, 12/20
4
At 38 I, long for the days when the phone couldn't leave the house.
13
@Travis ` A sad observation: when I mention to people that I don't have a smartphone (just a cellphone for car emergencies), it is most commonly people under the age of 40 who respond: oh, I wish I could...
As I walk across the local university campus toward the Library,
I can't help notice how many students are looking down at their
cell phones and how few are in the Library.
What, what, what is so important on the Internet that you have
to spend all your time looking at or for it ?
12
I am 61. I have lived to see three very bright teenagers puzzling over how to deal with a dial phone. They thought you dialed then picked up the receiver. I recently went thrift store shopping with my granddaughter (age 8) who attempted the same maneuver. None of my students understands the idiom "put that guy on dial tone." This is what it means to feel like a relic ...
11
Good article! Landlines do one thing and do it well; provide clear constant two way communications. Oh, and they used to work when the power went off.
By contrast, regardless of carrier or device, the quality of cell phone voice connections is deteriorating rapidly. Service was actually better in 2010; now the use of the call feature is just a shiny object Verizon et al use to capture unjustified dollars and data on our use of all other features.
Sad day that tech is regressing. But it really is. All the valley cares about is $$.
11
Where I live the landline is necessary and somehow reassuring. It is much less stressful to answer my home phone than the Iphone where all kinds of threats to one’s health might exist, according to recent articles and not those written by the woo-woo set.
1
@Ex- ExPat: I keep my iPhone on “Do Not Disturb” most of the time. There is the option of letting calls through from one’s list of favorites, so if the phone rings, I know that is someone I know, and even then, I don’t always answer. I don’t have hands-free while driving (car is too old), so I never answer when I am driving; just can’t do two things well at the same time, so driving takes precedence. My son called me once to ask where the gravy was, and I rear ended another car (minor).
Enjoyed watching 'Butterfly 8' recently, starring Elizabeth Taylor, where the use of the rotary phone features highly, and a warm mink coat leads to tragedy.
The holiday is a 'time to eat rum-doused fruitcake'; there is one here in the fridge, and perhaps I should try it, since my ears are still ringing from my evangelical neighbor's gracious call and definition of this culinary delight. A small gift that she was having for tea. Naturally I fibbed and took her to the land of plum-pudding.
The cell comes in handy if locked out of the house, or if there is a power outage. A friend in England is asking for a mobile number and I will have to confess that I am still half in the last century.
There was no phone at boarding-school in France during the Students' Revolution in 1968, except the one guarded with fervor by the nun at the reception desk. True, we had graduated from ink-wells to pens that left few blots on our unenlightened essays.
There was the land-line call received from a journalist when working in the corporate world, and fortunately my colleague took it. It ended up as an editorial in The New York Times when times were slower. Are you sure it wasn't you, asked my flustered boss, longing to give me a lecture on giving interviews.
It sounds as if smartphones have not made all of us smarter, while running faster to stay in the same place. Perhaps the time has come to learn what a tweet is while trying for more 'discretion' in The New Year.
4
Listen, we have a landline and a basic answering machine. We have no cell phones except for a little burner flip phone without internet access we use when we travel (and only costs me $30 a year). But our day to day lives are not tied to a phone. We make appointments. We Show up for them. We choose whether or not to take a phone call by letting the machine screen it. We only call and talk to people in the privacy of our own home. Texting is so time consuming on a flip phone it discourages mindless chatting — texts have a purpose.
I can truly understand the need for a cell phone to be reached for emergencies for kids, aging parents, whatever. But a flip phone is more than adequate. You can say no to all that other stuff. We are able to PAY ATTENTION to the scenery when we are out and about, enjoy chatting with strangers, thrill when we get lost and discover something g new, sit quietly in contemplation when in transit. I am constantly bewildered by people who won’t take control of their technologies yet complain about how tethered they are. It just isn’t that hard.
41
@M. Gerard -- I agree completely. I had a flip phone until my carrier stopped supporting it. Now I have a "smart"phone. But I have intentionally NOT learned to access the internet on it, nor set up e-mail on it, nor learned how to use GPS. I use it as I used my flip phone--to make phone calls and to send occasional texts-- with the additional function that I use it as a camera. That's it. I neither want nor need the other features on it. I keep it turned off a good part of the time and have the ringer set to silent, and I still look at the scenery when I'm out, talk to my husband when we're in a restaurant, and generally engage with the world around me and leave my phone in my purse. You're absolutely right that there's no need to let the technology control you.
6
Mobile phones have aided and abetted anonymity and disengagement. Go into a restaurant on any given Sunday for brunch and look at the diners around you of a certain (younger) age. Their eyes are in their screens, only intermittently on each other. In the most fundamental sense, they are not present.
41
@Mark Siegel Anonymity from other humans in proximity, but certainly not anonymity from surveillance and data appropriation.
2
I gave up my real (copper) land line, because it became too expensive.
But less than half of my monthly bill was for service. The bigger part was one tax after the other, and fees. NYS used it as a cash cow for taxes. The 911 tax added was used for general spending, so another 911 tax was added.
6
I've been thinking about landlines. My son is living out west with his fiancee and when I call him I get him, not her. I was thinking would be so great if I could call his phone, and occasionally she might pick it up, and I might have a conversation with her, just by accident. But she has her own cell phone, so I guess in order to talk to her, I'll need to call her, not him. But it just feels like something has been lost. This is what I've been thinking about.
126
Even better I remember not having a phone at all and only having access to a pay phone, which was far away to use, clumsy and expensive. Writing letters with paper and pen, sometimes daily, and checking the mail each day for replies elevated relationships to what they should be - something to invest in and cherish.
Wonderful writing, Mr. Cohen!
21
@Rich D Things change. I do not wish for a time when my four sisters, parents and grandmother shared one phone which hung on the kitchen wall. I also feel no nostalgia for our black and white television with tin foil antenna that got five channels. People seem to see everything in the past through cross-border glasses.
4
@Maureen -- I don't feel any nostalgia for television, period. I haven't owned one since 2001 and I cannot imagine ever letting that stream of chattering inanity back into my life.
2
@Maureen Things change but not always for the better and I'll take NOT being connected 24/7 to this sad state now, the expectation that you are available instantly.
Leave a message, maybe I'll get back to you!
Just like a gazillion channels available to view, how many are really worth it??
Live long landlines!
1
"I said you arranged to meet a friend at a certain place at a certain time and you showed up."
40 years ago, I was traveling through the Southern hemisphere with a friend. Somewhere in the north of Queensland/Australia we split up but agreed to meet for my 24th birthday on a remote mountain hut in the Southern Alps of New Zealand 3 months later.
We arrived within an hour of each other.
He had carried a bottle of Irish Coffee up the mountain, I had pulled out a trout from the lake next to the hut.
The timing was perfect.
That birthday is unforgettable.
No phone required.
106
They’ll have to pry my landline out of my cold, dead hands.
I use my landline often, such as when I need to make simultaneous calls because wait times to speak to a customer service rep are so long.
Also, if my mobile phone stops working for some reason, my landline keeps me from being cut off from the world. And of course I do use it to call my mobile phone when I’ve misplaced it.
Plus, the landline receiver is easier to tuck between my cheek and shoulder if I want to type on my keyboard but don’t want to use the speakerphone mode of my mobile phone.
The real downside to my landline phone is the fact that I get so many more spam calls on it than on my mobile phone. It’s gotten to the point where I no longer answer a call on my landline. But robots and human spammers leave messages — spoken or soundless — on the landline voicemail box, so when I come back from a trip I have to plow through 25 bogus messages to make sure I haven’t missed that call from the doctor’s office.
My landline was even more useful a few years back, when it was connected to Verizon via a copper wire. Then, even in an ice storm, I could count on my landline phone to work. Now, with fiber optic cable, when the electricity goes out, so does my landline service.
Long Live Landlines!
23
@ALB
My landline works even when the power is out. That is one reason I won't give it up.
8
@ALB Couldn't agree more. Friends & family know if they want to talk, call me on the land line. I have a smart phone which I mostly text on as I don't particularly like talking on the cell phone. Transmission on cell phones, no matter what brand is not as good as on land lines. If someone calls me I can tell immediately when they are calling from a cell phone. While I have cordless phones in my home with voicemail, I keep one regular phone connected to a jack that ALWAYS works even if the power goes out. And besides it IS easier to cradle a landline phone between your chin & shoulder than it is for any cell phone. And your hands don't cramp if having a long conversation. But, I think one of the things I miss as a result of the invention of the cell phone, is people going into the privacy of a phone booth, closing the door to make their call in private so I don't have to listen to their call. Is it me or does everyone else notice that the majority of people talking on cell phones in public all use their 'out door voices'. Drives me nuts.
9
We admittedly are old but we have two. One in our home the other at our lake cabin.
My wife does have an iPhone but in a power outage a land line can be a life saver particularly in the western UP of MI where cell service is spotty at best and the power lines run through the woods.
9
Another great retrospective by Roger, with which I totally agree. Except I still have a landline as my principal phone. I also have a smartphone for emergencies and reading the NYT while waiting for appointments. It's a great convenient tool if used adequately and intelligently. But a land line has its own advantages and is safer for personal verification issues. Fortunately I live in a smallish town where the majority are visitors looking for that relaxed moment being untethered to the busy commercial world and emotionally removed from their acquaintances and daily chores of personal maintenance and social obligations. Most people here are engaged with their environment, walking, talking, shopping, biking or dining, for which the smartphone is used primarily to make reservations or getting alerted that their table is ready. And as winter arrives, it becomes progressively quieter, freeing many of us to enjoy peaceful walks on nearly empty beaches and woodland paths with the cellphone safely tucked in a deep pocket just in case of an emergency, as other callers on my landline can leave a messages to which I respond on my own time.
8
I have a landline.
My eyes are in the sky,
or scanning branches of trees,
or looking at the cracks in the street
where life, miraculously grows.
I recognize the convenience of a smartphone,
but not having one has kept me alert and curious
about the world around me.
The one use I would want a smartphone for would be, ironically, as a camera.
16
I'm a boomer, and I'm not nostalgic for the landline I gave up circa 2010, when I swapped it for a cell phone. My landline cost $40/month for (very) local service only. There was constant static on the line, and often salsa music (a radio station, apparently) could be heard in the background during calls. For a time I received random calls every morning beginning at 6:30; when I answered, I heard the hollow banging of a working lineman. When I hung up, it rang again. Repeat, several times.
A hard rain would predictably interrupt service all over town, and a tweet to the phone company yielded only a request to DM them, presumably to take a public issue private and avoid bad publicity.
Calling a doctor or service person meant waiting inside, chained to the silent phone, unable to step outdoors, sometimes all day. When a friend tried to call, the message recorder blinked uselessly until someone came home.
Absolutely, cell phones need to be equipped with enhanced 911 service. That's a concern. Even so, I'd never go back.
5
It's not just teenagers. Stumbling upon a vintage (non-electronic) wall phone recently, I asked the man overseeing the place if it was still connected. He seemed to have no idea how to find out. I had to remind him that one can just pick up the receiver and listen for a dial tone. Besides the lost memory of dial tones, there's the even further lost memory of phones that don't involve batteries, chargers, and buttons to access the dial tone.
13
I have the ubiquitous iPhone. I have to. Everyone I know texts now..even my septuagenerian friends and of course my daughters who are now grown women. I also have a land line. Yes, it is cordless and sits in a charger when not used. However, that is my preferred mode of communicating if not face to face. I find it tedious to email a conversation as well as text one. And I do not like chatting on a device when out and about. By nature, I am a people watcher. I like "spying on" people of different ages, genders, races, and ethnicities. And I will admit I even eaves-drop at times, but don't tell anyone. There is something to be said about the difference between having our arbitrary ears or eyes employing a mobile device or observing the commonality we human beings have with each other. I like it. And regarding our old land lines, does anyone have an old Princess phone they want to sell?
13
@Kathy Lollock Too late Kathy. I gave mine to my niece to use as a prop at a theater she works in.
1
@Kathy Lollock
I finally gave in to pressure about having a smart phone about three years ago when my then-76-year-old neighbor, who was twice my age, informed me that I needed to get with the time! Not exactly sorry to have it, but...
Like you, I enjoy being in the moment. So for non-emergency discussions, I prefer talking over texting, and speaking focusedly from the privacy of home over imposing my conversations on others - plus missing out on things like people watching, which I would miss out on if I became one with my phone. As things are, it’s hard enough to enjoy being out with others when it means having to hear one-way conversations from those who won’t put their cellphones down.
As always, thanks for what you wrote. Take care.
1
Wonder what they would name the “princess” phone today? Remember those awful pepto bismol pink and blue? Yuck!
We have a landline at home and I hope that there is no VoiP as Brian mentioned.
We also have cell phones. I use mine for calls to and from family. It's also a back-up contact number if my child's school needs to reach me.
A couple of years ago, someone sent an e-mail asking me to text her cell phone so she would have my cell phone number. I told her that my cell phone was for family use. I did not want to be immediately available at any time to anyone. Taking a call when you are visiting with other people seems inherently rude.
Scamming seems to be so prevalent. I check caller i.d. when a call comes in on the landline or cell and any call from a number I do not recognize is not answered.
I remember too, my grandmother and my great aunt had their landline telephones in their dining rooms. It was a room that was centrally located from the kitchen or the living room. I loved the so called "gossip bench" that my great aunt had. It had a place to sit, a small table for taking a message, and a place for telephone directory books. The Chicago white and yellow page directories of the 1960s weighed several pounds each. And when the new directories came, the old ones were great for pressing flowers.
14
I've kept my land line in addition to my cell phone. The sound quality is still better, and I don't have to worry about dropped calls. Also friends with only cell phones often don't get the call (often their phone does not ring/buzz, etc. because they are in a dead or almost dead zone. They find out later from voicemail that they missed the call. Several years ago during a day of region wide thunderstorms which killed electrical power for up to nine days, I had phone service, when people's cell phones batteries had been exhausted.
15
@Dan S.
I'm from Hawaii, where hurricanes, while not common, did make landlines, lifelines. And landlines didn't depend on satellite connections; remember on 9/11 everyone's cell overloaded the wavelengths?
And no one mentions the health and environmental effects of cell phones. Sounds overly cautious, but all those energies so close to the brain, all the time if you use an earpiece.
For environmental effects, all our phones are small computers, loaded with rare earth elements that are mined in other, not so democracy-friendly, countries. Often the miners are underpaid, sometimes they're slaves. Mining is never good for the planet, and rare earth ore refining is especially polluting.
If I had my druthers, everyone who wishes to lead a more environmentally conscious life would give up their cell phones, insist on fewer and simpler computers in their cars and TVs and washing machines and etc., and consider evacuating the Cloud.
14
For a few years in the late 1950s our small Wisconsin town had for a year or so a time limit on local calls--5 minutes. You were reminded that you had one minute left so you could firm up a date or meeting time. Off to college I had trouble calling home because my four younger sisters had the phone in almost constant use. Each home back then had one phone. Before we got dials we talked to the operator, "central," and told her the two digit (local) number we wanted.
11
Down here in hurricane country, my true landline has never gone down during a storm, and that's why I keep it even though it's twice as expensive (with a limited service plan) as my cell phone (no limits). The add-on charges to the landline are obscene. The 'machine' screens the landline, and the cell is usually turned off. Leave your message at the beep and I'll get back to you whenever:)
6
Like many I grew up with a landline, spending hours, if my parents let me, on the phone with friends, especially girls. One of my memories is the distinctive smell of the mouthpiece which everyone used but no one cleaned as far as I know.
7
The landline (called POTS - plain old telephone service - in technical jargon) is not finished. Witness fires and blackouts in California. During the Tubbs fire, Sonoma County, 2017, over 60% of people lost landline service, usually discovered when they used their backup phones to call emergency services. Like in the recent multi-day blackouts, cell phone towers lost power as well as internet lines. Over the previous 15 years alarm systems were shifted online, and landlines that people thought remained copper quickly detoured into VoiP (internet) lines. It saved the phone co. money. When emergencies cause power to go out, these all go down. Only those lucky enough to still have copper between their house and the fire dept could get help. Landlines need only tiny amounts of power, and remain operable for weeks during a blackout.
AT&T is so dysfunctional they can't even tell you whether there's a VoiP stage in your landline, between you and the fire department. I'm on a California school board, and tried to find out for the school. The AT&T technician reached (after hours of effort) told me to wait until the next no-power emergency, then try calling the fire department from the school. If it doesn't work, it means there's a VoiP section. Amazing! Wait for an emergency to see if you can reach emergency services!
Networks need to be regulated. That was understood by anti-trust crusaders 100 years ago, who broke up Standard Oil but let AT&T remain whole. But very regulated.
52
@Brian I don't disagree, except that AT&T was broken up into smaller 'bells' in 1984 (I lost my job there in 1983 due to consolidation of operator services). It not only reconsolidated, it's bigger and more dysfunctional than ever. https://www.businessinsider.com/att-breakup-1982-directv-bell-system-2018-02
1
Unfortunately, there's been a policy of manipulation and deception practiced by AT&T. among other landline service providers, to hijack landline and potential landline customers in their franchise areas from traditional lifeline service to internet and wireless phones.
At t some point in the past, AT&T or another telecom was granted an exclusive franchise to serve as your local U.S.area's landline service provider. But with the advent of wireless and its far lower maintenance costs, telecom profit margins have increased exponentially and eliminated any incentive for franchisees to keep up their end of their public service bargain.
Now, further enriched by the add-on services and tv bundles they relentlessly market, their internal policy is to do everything possible to up-sell customers into those internet-based services instead.
Meanwhile, how do you make a call when then internet is down, when the power is out, when the tower malfunctions? If you don't have a true landline, you don't.
It's just one of the many disservices the telecommunications industry and their government agents (the FCC and our political representatives) have delivered to the public.
And, it's another good reason to get the money out of politics and the corporations out of bed with OUR representatives.
41
This column took me back to our kitchen in 1967 with its wall phone and a cord that had been stretched long enough for me to reach into my room right across the hall so I could find some privacy! I can still hear my mom yelling at me to hang up the phone because, "you just came home from seeing your friends...you don't need to talk to them again!"
Everyone wants your cell phone number now. There is no down time. For me, I do not want to be called from a friend who wants to chat, and especially not from a doctor with bad test results, when I'm in the cereal aisle in the grocery store or out to dinner or on vacation. The call can wait. They can leave me a message on my answering machine connected to my landline. I do miss the cord, though.
34
@Francine Larson Your mother and mine must have gone to the same parenting school. I used to hear those same words almost daily (as did my best friend) after parting ways from our walk home from school, only to pick up the phone and call each other. But our phone had a 25' cord so I was able to take the phone (the only one) from the kitchen where it was connected out a back door to sit on the steps to pick up the conversation we had ended earlier.
4
Yeah, lets hear it for the landline. I was 25 years old before I got a telephone in my appartment, a landline of course. What glorious moment that was. I kept it ever since because it is simple, cheap and reliable.
In fact, during this year's series of power cuts, my landline never stopped working, but many peoples' cellphones did. Boy, were they surprised (and helpless). Turns out that cellphone towers have no power back-up and stop working within 24 hours of any power cut or outage.
I have a cheap burner cellphone for when I drive or travel with a number that I hardly share with anyone. Keeps my life simple and quiet...
39
@xtrimmo Exactly! I am the same.
I have a landline as my main phone and a flip phone I've had for years for safety and convenience when I travel...and I rarely share the number.
My friends don't really understand. I think they view me as charmingly eccentric and don't understand how I can exist without a smartphone. But I love my uncomplicated life with its distraction-free spaces of time which allows me to look around, to listen and to more fully love and appreciate the life that I have been given for this very brief moment.
30
@C.C. -- I finally gave in a few months ago and got a "smart" phone because my cell company was about to stop supporting the old flipphone I'd had for ten years and it would become useless. I want some sort of cellphone for calling Triple A in an emergency, that sort of thing, and I thought it would be nice to be able to text friends and relatives who don't bother with e-mail anymore. But I haven't loaded my e-mail onto the smartphone, I don't use GPS, I intentionally haven't learned how to use the internet on it. I use it for three things: to make and receive phone calls, to text, and to take pictures. That's all I want it to do. And when I don't want to be bothered, I turn it off. The voicemail works and I can respond later.
14
I've got somewhat of a hearing disability, 4specially in the higher frequencies of the human voice. As a result, I have difficulty understanding conversations over cell phones, because they operate within a narrower frequency range than do land line phones. This is by design, to give cell phones more channels to operate on. No such problem with old fashioned land liners!
45
@Giskander
I just got hearing aids. I much preferred landlines before I got the hearing aids. Now, the bluetooth connection between my cell phone and the hearing aids makes the cell phone far more attractive.
8
Roger, I've long admired your writing, and this column is beautifully written as always, and a reminder of what we've lost by depending solely on cellphones to do everything. So many people are now slaves to their phones; it's quite frightening, actually. I love your memories of childhood in England. Thanks for writing this!
51
Am I wrong, or could both people talk at the same time without one voice cutting out the other on a hard-wired phone (not cordless)? It felt more like a regular conversation.I too loved that you knew where people were, and they couldn't really be doing anything else, much, at the same time.
26
@Gillian You're correct the *older* landlines that were hard-wired (pre-internet) had technology that allowed both people to talk at once without cutting out the other person. Also, it had some feedback of your voice to you so you could gauge how loud you were speaking - yes, you could speak softly but still be heard. Those two features made it a superior technology as far as having a more personal communication - no yelling required.
24
@Gillian Yes, you are correct! Because of the inclusion of "side tone" on landlines, it was rare to talk over the other person because some of your own voice is fed back into your headset. Because of side tone, you can tell if your microphone is working, how loud you are speaking and if your call is connected. Sure wish that could be simulated on cell phones.
2
At my family home in Bucks County, PA, in the early 1950's, we had a party line. There were perhaps five or six households on this and one had to count the rings to know if the call was for you. The phone bill was much reduced for this sharing. Of course, we still had the dreaded announcement of a long distance call that would cause everyone to be thunderstruck. We kids had to immediately be silent. Most people had but a single phone in their houses and a ring would bring people running from all directions. There were specialized telephone desks made that had a built-in seat with a small flat surface for the unit and writing notes.
42
I loved the landline until robocalls became the norm. There was no method of call screening and the interruptions were constant. I finally removed it in favor of my iPhone and its "Do Not Disturb" feature, which blocks those not in my contact list and sends them to voicemail. Would I could return to the days of a landline that only rang when a friend actually wanted to talk to me.
23
@Karen H My phone informs me "scam likely," which has been a godsend. On my cell, I instantly see if the number is unfamiliar to me, in which case I usually don't pick it up. Because cell phones are not publicly available, there are a lot less robocalls, which seem to have rendered the Do Not Call list inoperative by constantly switching phone numbers.
4
@HKGuy --Every time I go through my "recents" list and hit "Block this caller," the bots just scramble the numbers & keep calling. If I see the same "exchange" (the three digits after the area code) as my cell or landline, I don't answer and then block the number. Lately they even spoof the city & state from which they're purportedly calling. If I don't see the name of a person or entity, I simply don't answer. If it's important, they'll leave a message--but often even those voicemails are phone spam!
2
Landlines are also more reliable during times of disaster. During Hurricane Katrina, cell phones were useless but landlines held up.
29
Never had a cell-phone.
Never will.
The idea that people could call and bother me whenever and wherever they want to is an obscenity to me.
Leave me a message. When I get home, I might get back to you.
33
@Larry Thiel -- You can turn a cellphone off, and then the calls go to voicemail. So you get a message and can return the call if and when you feel like it. I have a cellphone for emergencies when I'm travellng, but I don't leave it on all the time by any means. And when it is on, I usually have the ringer set to silent, so people can't actually bother me whenever they want to!
8
@Larry Thiel You're not required to give out your phone number to everybody, and there is no phone book for cell phones. The only people who call my cell phone are my husband and kids.
2
Okay Boomer, as my teenagers would say.
6
Not only does my mother still have a yellow kitchen wall phone, it has a rotary dial. Grandchildren find it fascinating.
59
Just realized I only know two phone numbers and one is my mom who has had the same landline number for decades. Everyone else is just in my contacts list. How things change. If I ever lost my phone.......Maybe I need an “old school “ paper address book?
11
@Greenie Every carrier offers back-ups of phone numbers and lots of other things that are easily transferable to a new phone.
2
@Greenie -- I still have a paper address book. Can't imagine NOT having one.
12
@HKGuy I was away from the house and had accidentally left my cell phone at home. I needed the dimensions for an item I was buying ibut eft them on the phone and couldn't call my husband because I hadn't memorized his cell phone number. Calling the land line was useless because we turned off the ringer to escape the incessant robo calls. I came home empty handed, poured myself a large glass of wine and made a list of important phone numbers to keep in my wallet. And don't even get me started on the poor quality of the transmission and audio on cell phones. I now depend on texts and talking to people in person. And the cell phone companies are not helpful they just are looking to sell an upgrade.
13
I continue to rely on Alexander Graham Bell's great invention, landline telephones that connect me to the world through a copper wire.
"Smart" they may not be, but you cannot lose them, they don't need recharging and the reception is very good except when a tree falls down on my outside telephone wire.
Plus, they make it a bit harder for the U.S. government and Amazon.com to keep track of me.
79
Here in Northern California, we keep a landline. During power outages, it continues to operate while our cell phones go down.
AT&T hates the things, and will not give you a new landline in our area. They service them only grudgingly.
But when the grid is down, we have a phone that works. During this year's power shutdowns, our neighbors were glad to come over and use our landline after the cell tower batteries bottomed out.
And the audio quality is just plain better than our expensive cell phones, as well.
43
In my experience in a Northern California, although AT&T is at times resistant to new landlines, if you try different agents during business hours and ask for someone familiar with POTS (plain old telephone service), you can get a new landline. They have no legal basis for refusing. And as you note, they work in a power outage.
13
We too, here in rural OR, have a landline for the very reasons you mentioned. Our local carrier, Pioneer Telephone (or whatever they’ve morphed the name into) seems to be more than happy to add new lines — one went in just down the road this fall.
We have a fixed, wall mounted phone that reminds me of the phone in the kitchen of my youth. And I will always remember my Christmas present when I was 13 — a princess phone extension in my bedroom. Private phone calls for the first time ever.
I like my smartphone for many reasons, but sound quality isn’t one. When I really want to hear what someone says, the landline is the answer.
13
And you know, this was only 15 years ago. Maybe 10. Like the many factories in my city that literally disappeared. In less than a generation. Age 60, as I am, is not that old. But the then and now in our lifetime in the U.S. since 1960 -- oh my God. No wonder collective heads are spinning. The world seems totally out of control. And so our deep political veer to the right for so many, many Americans, like a desperate U-turn back to the comfort of landline phones, girls next door, a second shift job at the plant, and morning and evening newspapers. Too much too fast for too many of us, and it shows in the tears of our national fabric.
78
Nailed it. I'm 66 and feel every bit of your comment.
24
@JTS Gay marriage, gays serving openly in the military, true equal opportunity for minorities in jobs and housing, a revolution in mainstream religion embracing social justice, sports teams no longer sanctuaries for bad behavior, bullying out in the open ... I see a whole lot of change for the better from when I was young several decades ago.,
15
@HKGuy I've been out and gay since 1977. Those things are good but overall I feel a really negative, rude society evolving in the United States.
17
I use my landline daily & save the cell for emergencies. I never use a cell outdoors for chatting. Sadly today I watch mothers ignoring their toddlers in the stroller as the mother's attention is completely on her phone. In my day I always used stroller time to talk to my child, stop and look, name and touch things.) The Beat Generation had the great, famous motto: "Be here now!"
121
Same thing with people walking dogs while their focus is on phone conversation -- sometimes painful to watch that lack of connection as well.
41
@Margie Moore
"Be Here Now" was after the Beats. Part of the later self-realization, Ram Dass movement of late 60s early 70s.
7
@Margie Moore
The kids are also facing forward in their strollers, away from the "caregiver" so they can't even experience a conversation vicariously, and in New York are used as hapless battering rams as their distracted parents plow through traffic.
2
Another important disadvantage of individually owned phones is the loss of the element of surprise.
When a grandparent calls, there's no chance to chat with whoever answers. Many a grandparent would love to hear a child pick up the phone and talk, even if only for a minute or two.
Kids once ran for the phone and now can't.
When adults called friends, but someone else answered, it was good to have even a brief encounter with the person's spouse or partner, to keep a relationship alive. It was fun to speak to their children of any age, too, if they answered. That small regular contact cemented relationships.
I use my land line except in emergencies. I prefer to call others with land lines, to avoid the "phone-going-dead" issue or the overlapping conversations and delays. But now that land lines are controlled by the same providers are cell phones, those problems have reappeared.
Last year, Verizon forced me to let them replace my copper wires with fiberoptics. They literally threatened to disconnect my land line number if I continued to refuse. As a result, all the phones in my house, including three that aren't plugged into the wall as well as to a phone jack, go out instantly in any power outage, like toasters.
46
I'm 67, and I not only don't miss landlines, but with all their manifold problems and faults, I find cell phones a godsend. Sure, back in the day, you made appointments. But if something happened and you were stuck on a train or in cab, it was a missed appointment. Reception with cells is fine these days -- a lot better than the scratchy voice on long-distance calls; if, that is, the circuits weren't busy. I couldn't remember more than a handful of phone numbers, and love having all the numbers inside my phone.
As to the main argument, that cell phones now rule our lives, preoccupy us and don't allow us to get away from it all, I have the solution to that problem: I don't answer calls when I don't want to be disturbed.
10
@HKGuy I forgot to add that the paragraph about thumbs, distracted walking and neck problems looking down have nothing to do with telephone conversations on a cell phone, but texting. I always use Google Voice when I text and Speaker when I'm talking to someone, so my neck and line of vision while walking are both fine.
2
@HKGuy Glad someone is bringing up the other side of this. The subtitle's, "You left home" especially sticks out for me. One of my favorite things about getting my first cell phone a generation ago was the joy of being able to leave home whenever I wanted, since a person no longer had to sit around at home waiting for an important call! And how many of us SoCal folks wax fondly for the pre-GPS days of driving around LA with your Thomas Guide on the passenger's seat and your heart in your mouth? Safe it was not... The column and commenters make good points, but as usual, we tend to over-romanticize older technologies as icons part of better/simpler/safer times.
1
@Wondering -- I do not use GPS. I can't count the number of times I've been riding with friends or family who rely on GPS and have seen it send them entirely wrong. I've seen people using GPS ignore common sense, ignore street signs, ignore everything except the gizmo telling them to turn here or go straight there. I'm horrified by the way people who use GPS never internalize any sense of the layout of the town they're in, never form an internal map of anything, but just follow the instructions from the obnoxious GPS voice. Give me a good old-fashioned map any day. The sad thing is that paper maps are becoming harder to find all the time.
4
Most Vietnam veterans have more to complain about than I do but when I was clerk on a base camp in Vietnam the telephone service was terrible with all kinds of static and dropped calls.
After I returned to the US I took decent phone service for granted until cell phones were introduced and all Americans could enjoy war zone service.
23
We are not getting rid of the landline anytime soon.
When people call that number, it leaves the possibility of speaking with any member of the household, as opposed to the exclusive nature of calling an individual’s cell phone.
There’s something appealing about the simplicity of the landline’s single purpose - just to have phone calls.
And we never have to worry about the house phone getting lost who-knows-where, rarely of the battery dying.
Newer isn’t always better.
18
I had the strangest experience in a popular Upper West Side restaurant recently. I got there before my friend arrived, and there was no seat at the bar. So I stood by that bar, and kept my phone in my pocket. Instead, I just took in the surroundings, the happy chatter, the people, lighting, reflections, and movement. It was a strange meditative pleasure, and for about 15 minutes, I also experienced what it was like to have folks look at you like you're crazy.
118
@Snowball I still consider my public transit commute to be "me time." I keep my phone tucked away--my wireless earbuds are linked to my AppleWatch only to play music as I look out the window at the changing scenery. I'm a senior citizen (well, duh) and on crowded trains I see male millennials & Gen-Z'ers sitting in "priority" seats (sometimes manspreading and keeping their backpacks on the adjacent seat), heads bowed, eyes glued to their phones lest they catch my gaze and have to offer me their seats.
23
@Snowball of course, on the other hand, I do a lot of reading on my smartphone when I'm out and about and not otherwise engaged, which means I read Cohen, Douthat, Krugman, Boylan, and Renkl columns that might otherwise not always be read. (Not Goldberg though. She's just too predictable :) )
1
I still live in a landline world. I do have a cellphone but keep it turned off almost all the time at home and even when I am not home. Nobody else I live with leaves a cellphone on at home either. But landlines have drastically changed. The vast majority of calls are now scams. The phone rings throughout the day and mostly we look at the caller ID, see it is a scam, and don't answer. However, a big advantage of landlines is there are no companies collecting data from them other than phone companies collecting meta data. Also, nobody can listen in from the outside without a court warrant. Cellphone conversations lack that protection There is no guarantee of privacy with a cell phone. As I understand the police or illegal parties potentially could be listening using devices that mimic cellphone towers to intercept calls. And, even when electricity is lost landlines seem to continue to function. Landlines have it all over cellphones at home for these reasons and I think it is a mistake not to rely on landlines as much as possible. And if life is calmer so much the better.
23
@Bob
I agree with everything you say. One more thing - I use my landline to do interviews with people because the sound is better for recording, and it's more reliable. Cell phones have their place, but I don't want to give up my landline, ever!
7
I cannot imagine being without my landline - which I've relied upon continuously since March 1991 (when I moved to the East Coast).
Though I have a cellphone (my second since I bought my first cellphone in February 2006), I don't use it much, except to keep in touch with family and a few close friends.
My landline provides a vital function as a conduit for my internet and cable TV service. It gives me peace of mind and a deep sense of rootedness. I hope to keep my landline for life.
7
Thank you! Great reminder of a different era...that we "Boomers" remember and cherish.
8
And exchanges. If you want to wax nostalgic about landlines and rotary phones, you shouId mention named exchanges. They were humanizing and a little romantic. Like Butterfield-8 or "Call Northside -77". I remember mine. Wadsworth 7. The New York Times Was Lackawanna 4.
Then all digit dialing came along and it was all downhill from there. Except that I couldn't take videos of my dog with my rotary phone.
I have a desk phone that connects with my cell phone and my wife's. Works fine until I get a call late at night and have to answer the thing in the dark while fumbling for my glasses. Then I wish I could just pick it up and say, "Hello," or something less polite. Tech giveth and tech taketh away.
11
Love my landline, its nice to come home to a blinking light and not schedule my life around someone else's call. I watch people completely absorbed by the next ping or buzz, staring at their hand and its sad but not my problem, I'm smelling the roses!
Also, cells don't work in our rural location so why bother?
Live long landline!
11
Tons of newer research point out that the overuse of Internet phones and games is due to the loneliness of people. I think the same loneliness was characteristic when land-line phones were prevalent but options to address this were different. Perhaps pur concern and focus as a civilization should be addressing endemic loneliness itself rather than technology, old or new.
9
In the great ice storm of 1998 that devastated eastern Ontario and Quebec , taking down trees and electrical service for days in the minimum and weeks for many, the early cellphones died immediately . The land lines lasted for two days until apparently the emergency substation batteries ran down ... up until then we isolated , no power, laneways choked with downed trees but at least we had contact with the outside world .. Bell managed to get small generators to the stations within a few days and the relief to get the phone back to keep in touch with vulnerable friends and neighbours was palpable.
We still have a landline .
9
Roger, what a lovely little gift for Christmas. I know your Mothers’ Perfume, a true classic floral citrus, the scent of a Lady. Certainly Cell Phones have their place, and make life more convenient. But, we have lost something. A sense of time, of meeting obligations and showing up when expected and promised. Oh, maybe this is just a middle-aged Woman version of
“ Get off my Lawn “. Whatever. But I really love the glimpse into your younger life, this transported me immediately to a long past England, that I’ve only known from Movies, TV and Books. Many, many Books. Roger Cohen, Time Travel Agent.
My sincere Happy Holidays to you and your entire Family.
25
In late October, our felonious utility PG&E cut power to my city for about 40 hours in anticipation of a wind event about 200 miles away (go figure). Cell phones didn't work. VOIP phones didn't work. Our trusty AT&T landline, which we've kept around in case of another earthquake, worked. Now AT&T is trying to exit the land line business. If they provide your land line, it's time to contact your utilities regulator. The land line is a life line.
29
I mostly use my landline. I can't get rid of the instruments, as the door intercoms ring on them. By which line is ringing, I can tell if the person is up the stoop, or under the stoop. I can often dispense with the person without going down.
Plus all my landlines have headsets. I much prefer to talk on a headset then holding a handset.
By selectively giving out my cell number, and promptly adding that person to my contact list, I can use the app Call Blocker. It blocks any calls that are not on my contact list.
On my landline I have the free NoMoRobo. Not perfect, but I can't imagine not having it.
3
Or a party line. Or call boxes. On our first trip through England, driving through the December countryside, searching out obscure churches, no cell phone, no GPS, just a creased paper atlas, and the urgency of having the right change for the call box. The planning, the due diligence, not resting in the belief that the entire world was at our fingertips on a smart phone. Yeah, something's been lost.
27
I too have a beloved landline. It will have to be ripped from my cold dead hands because I will never give it up voluntarily. The reason: In the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that hit San Francisco so hard, cell phones flatlined. Dead as can be. No calls. No checking on family. No checking on destruction. What saved the day was the newspaper office had one landline -- attached to the fax machine. The line to use the fax phone snaked around the newsroom. Then we all headed out on foot. It was a time.
6
@Jan Shaw, I had the same experience that day. The electric phone system went out, and I grabbed our fax line to let my family know I was OK.
5
Awesome writing.
My landline is still the best instrument for long conversations while lying on the sofa in front of the fireplace. Its slender round shape fits my hand and my ear better than the sleek, stiff rectangle of my iPhone. The audio comes through and goes out with a clarity I can't get from a cell phone, even when using the speaker. I'll never give up my landline.
40
I love my landline because when the power goes out and my cell phone doesn't work (rural America), I still have a means of communication because the land line does work. Some old technologies are great in a pinch and could save your life!
24
My landline functions as personal identity. People who provide services, products, and request donations demand my telephone number. So I pay $50 a month to AT&T for a telephone number. The phone is frequently unpluged. In a year I might make as many as 24 outgoing calls. The incoming calls, mostly from telemarketers and fake charities, number about 300 per year. There is no smart phone in my house. I prefer to communicate with others face-to-face. For communicating at a distance, my preference is to write a letter with a fountain pen. There still are mail carriers who will deliver letters. One amusing item: Alexander Bell answered the telephone with the word "Ahoy!" Many people now answer the phone with the word "Hello!". I often answer the phone with the question, "What are you selling?" I often wish I was born 200 years earlier before the world was cluttered with frivolous messages.
12
@Michael Edward Zeidler I also ask what are you selling or when the person asks how am I doing I answer what do you want. Most times I just hang up. Or if it's a real person I might say, "I never do anything over the phone" and hang up.
@Michael Edward Zeidler I can going to adopt "Ahoy!"
1
I just have to repeat and emphasize this:
"It has been bad for the bonds that form the commons."
Oh, yes it has. It certainly has indeed!
Well said, Mr. Cohen.
25
To this day I still remember my family’s home phone number and the numbers of my aunts and uncles phones from the 60’s even though those numbers haven’t existed for decades. I barely have a clue of
remembering any phone numbers today.
45
@Ash
Phone companies reuse and reissue dormant phone numbers. I can assure you that if you dialed those numbers, you likel would get a live person on the other end... and it will not be an aunt or an uncle. :)
I have had my current landline for almost 30 years now.. and I STILL get calls on ocasion for the prior owner of the cell phone... somebody named Jose.
1
@Ash
When I was a kid in the 1960s, my mom & dad taught me to remember our telephone number in case of an emergency, or if I were ever lost. Of course, people actually answered calls back in those days, instead of screening the calls to decide whether or not they wanted to take the call.
To this day, more than 50 years later, I still remember our number...it was the HObart 1 exchange in Riverside NJ.
4
@Chuck:
"I can assure you that if you dialed those numbers, you likel would get a live person on the other end"
Not if the old phone number was only 5 digits.
Cellphones failed in recent California wildfires. Landlines are more reliable. When there is a major earthquake or similar disaster, don’t count on your cellphone. I was able to call from LA to NYC immediately after the 1994 Northridge quake despite lack of power. In fact, during the great Northeast power failure of 1965 (Google it!), I called from Boston to NYC although there was no power in either city.
24
We were living 5 miles from downtown Boston during the Marathon Bombing. Law enforcement turned off cell phone communication fearing that additional bombs would be detonated remotely via cellphone. We were grateful for the landline in our home which allowed us to communicate with friends and family immediately.
48
When I first got my telephone in a city many years ago, the phone number I was given had belonged to a Russian-American doctor firstly & apparently after that to a politician. Heavily accented voices demanded to speak to the doctor even after I'd informed them of the change. At least I could get the callers to the politician to hang up quickly. The phone was a grey rotary dial.
4
@Apple Jack - Funny you mentioned the color. I remember when a color phone would cost you more, and white was a color. And you didn't actually own the phone, it belonged to Ma Bell.
1