Requiem for the landline

We finally dropped the landline.

It’s not like we use it. We roll our eyes when it rings. It’s always pollsters or people asking for money. The phone isn’t conveniently located in the house. I’m always dodging junk trying to answer it. And people can use it to case our house, like back in the bad old days before caller ID.

Maybe I should be more touched than I am. The first time I had a phone in my room, I was 13. We moved to a house that had a jack in every bedroom. Somebody had left a phone in mine. This was in the days when phones came with your phone service. You didn’t own them, and you got charged for them. I guess Ma Bell lost track of this one.

The summer we moved to Raleigh, we didn’t bother getting a phone. The only people I knew there lived on my block, and I could use the phones at work. I occasionally called my parents from the neighbor’s house, and made sure I paid them when the bill came in. After sharing houses in college, it was second nature for all of us to examine a bill when it came in and track down all the long distance callers.

When we moved to a house in the woods, we used to get cased by phone late in the fall. It was like a Christmas season tradition. We did actually get broken into once. When the hang-up calls began again the next year, we bought an answering machine. Our message was that we were screening calls and would pick up only when the callers identified themselves. 

Two different years, we thwarted the thieves. They were not the same people. Our house was on a busy road, sheltered by woods. It made it a desirable target. When caller ID became available, we sprung for it, taking care of the problem once and for all.

By the time we moved to Nashville, we had cell phones with NC numbers. Kurt wanted to get a landline so he could have a Nashville number for music. He wanted to make sure he appeared local. We negotiated a package with AT&T.

The price started inching up. Then it began walking up. By the time it was going up every two months, I dropped all the extras, even though that invalidated our package and made the internet go up.

Slowly, the price started inching up again. When it reached critical mass, we called and complained, saying that all our younger friends locked into deals never offered to us because we weren’t new service. I considered it to be ageist. They gave us a loyalty retention rate which was not supposed to go up.

Except it did recently. Once it started, it rose every month.

Enough.

We still have a caller ID box sitting around somewhere. And two cordless phones. It's time to move on.