When I Had a Landline. . .

I almost panicked. My cell phone with its case containing my license and a credit card couldn’t be found. I just had it, I thought to myself. Really nervous, I said to my husband, “I can’t find my phone.” My voice reached a higher pitch. “What are you talking on?” he asked calmly.

How many times have you done that? Or something similar - like, searching forever to find your reading glasses when they are on your head the whole time?

When we had a landline, I never lost the phone. It was always on the wall. 

Remember the days when the whole family shared that one phone line? You’d want to talk to your friends but everyone else in the family wanted to use the phone too, so you’d only be given a certain amount of minutes. Or you’d hear your sibling complain, “Mom, she’s hogging the phone. Make her hang up.”

Everyone would be watching a show and the phone would ring. And ring. And ring. No one wanting to move. “You get it.” “No, you get it.” Or the opposite. The phone would ring and you knew that cute boy from 10th grade math class was going to call, and you raced to the phone, “I’ll get it,” so that no one would know or have a chance to speak to him first. Not that the whole conversation couldn’t be overheard by the entire family as you sat on the kitchen floor. No hiding in a separate room in those days.

There was always anticipation when the communal landline phone rang. Who was calling, and was the call for me or someone else in the family? 

It took a long time for me to relent to the persistent call (pun intended) to give up the landline. We don’t need it; everyone calls on our cell phones anyway, I heard. It’s costing a lot of money for something that never gets used, except by telemarketers, he said. 

It was hard for me to think about relying just on my cell phone. What about when my cell phone’s battery is drained? What then? What if I need to call 9-1-1? Will the call center know where I am if I’m on my cell phone?

And then the other matter. Misplacing it. Let’s face it, it’s much easier to lose a cell phone (or have it stolen) than a landline with its cord attached to the wall.

Then I realized, with most carriers, when a person calls 9-1-1 from their cell phone, the GPS coordinates are sent to the call center. I monitored the calls coming in to the landline over a period of time and found that hardly any calls were from friends or family. And frankly, I never let my phone’s battery get completely drained. 

I flew the white flag and relented. 

Now when my cell phone rings, I know it’s for me. I don’t have to share it with anyone. I can talk for as long as I want without anyone telling me it’s their turn. Plus, I can have several conversations at the same time while I text away with different people. 

Still, there’s something nostalgic about a landline. Many years from now when they are gone completely, I can hear me talking about them to future great grandchildren, “When I was your age, we had this phone attached to a wall,“ while perplexed little faces look back at me with the same expression I had when my elders would talk about horse and buggies, root cellars, and milkmen.