Since I work in the call center for a large cell phone company (unless I've been fired by the time you read this...not unlikely) I should tell you about the wonders of the modern telephone. It can text! E-mail! Browse the Web! Play music! Photograph girls in their underwear when they're not looking! Catch Michael Richards with his pants up and his mouth open!
I can't say I'm impressed with the modern telephone, however. Though it does all those other things great, it falls short in one important area: making phone calls.
Back in the olden days telephones did not come with volume buttons, for instance. Despite the lack of this feature I don't recall having any problems hearing someone. Nowadays you call the local store and turn the volume down so the on-hold commercials won't kill your eardrums. Then when a clerk gets on you can't turn the volume up high enough, though you keep pressing as though there's an "11" that wasn't mentioned in the owner's manual.
Even in the worst ice storms and tornadoes the old phone plugged into the wall rarely failed. Now with a wireless phone you can be standing in the wide open on a sunny-and-72 day and...hold on...are you still there? Hello? Oh, I thought I lost you. You're fading in and out. Wait let me...hello? I gotta call you back. Sorry. Dropped my connection. So as I was saying...
The sound quality on wireless phones is still by-and-large lacking. I usually hear some sort of metallic ocean wave sound washing through the middle of the conversation.
Emergencies are the one area where cell phones beat out pay phones but even then, they're not fail safe. One evening driving home from work I saw a homeless guy wandering around in the middle of an exit ramp. I called 911 to let them know somebody needed to get that guy out of the way, but all I got was a stop sign icon and a "boop boop boop!" sound telling me the circuits were busy and my call couldn't go through. Fortunately I was so busy marveling at my phone's ability to function as a calendar that I didn't even notice the homeless guy bouncing off the hood of my car.
When old people call and ask about particular models of cell phones they ask how big the buttons are. They're all microscopic. They work all right for me, but I guess they're frustrating for people who grew up with phones like my grandmother had for nearly 40 years (see above), with real bells, and handsets that probably weighed five pounds by themselves. No wonder people back then stayed in good health while eating largely fried diets.
I would say more but I gotta go. Someone's on the phone.
Written June 25, 2008
But no contest. The landlines were made to be a nuclear survivable mode of communication. And by in large? Still are. But damned if you can actually now make anything but a highly local call on most of them w/o incurring some serious and yes magically hidden fees & highly exorbitant charges.
The real piece of cake is the newer ever more complicated office phone systems of today. Want several lines? That will cost you plenty. Actually want to be able to leave someone a voice mail message while they're occupied on another (or the same) line? Something that was seemingly easy to do in the 1980's with 1970's technology? I'm sorry, but we're no longer capable of doing that!
No seriously, in nearly 20 years of using and now buying these phone systems, NONE of them has either a.) worked as intended or promised and b.) somehow actively 'degraded' very quickly to a 'bare bones' incapable system in a few short months and c.) some combo of a+b, depending on the day, the weather, the network administration status, if the computers were working 'well' that day or if the penguins were summering in Tierra del Fuego. Really. Impossible. To work well at all! And no one EVER takes any responsibility for these obvious failures. The contractor blames 'the lines' the phone company (who maintains a monopoly on the access to the lines) of course blames the equipment contractor. Deadly & now dangerous Outages are now common. Weeks long waits to correct such matters? can easily destroy your business. So everyone has learned to have several layers of 'backups' so as to muddle through. Where in 1965 or 1975? Someone's heads would roll for such rank idiocy. But today? It's fairly common to hear that no one's office phones Ever quite 'work right'. Or are 'down today/this week'. Amazing. We're certainly going backwards in simple functionality here. I think Dictaphone had a perfectly acceptable 'modern answering machine' by 1960, if not before. How come we still get 'dropped calls' or missing messages and we have thousands of times more & cheaper storage capacity? The mind boggles here for me too you old crank! Cheers & Good Luck, 'VJ'
What amazes me is the number of people dumping the old reliable wall phone to go with cell phones only, when all they do is complain about their cell reception! And let's compare prices: I can talk 450 minutes a month for $40 on a cell phone. I can talk on a wall phone 40,320 minutes a month for the same price, no dropped calls, no big per minute charges for going over my minutes. How do people get suckered into this scam? I'll do my e-mail on the computer and my phone can be a phone.