It was fine.
The Best part of that time was not being expected to be personally available every minute of the day. The phone was a part of your house and not a part of you.
was not being expected to be personally available every minute of the day
I’m just not and people get used to it. I take some days to answer to texts, often leave my phone where I can’t hear it and it kind of works fine. If it’s really important, people usually try several times.
I like the DND feature that mutes everything but rings for repeated calls within a certain time frame - that way if it’s something important enough, I can get notified the second time around, otherwise I can toss my phone somewhere and not be bothered until I decide to look at it again.
Same here. I check it a couple of times per day but rarely have it on my person all the time. It’s usually on mute or vibrate, and I’ve set most notifications to hidden/silent except for the ones that matter to me.
I will never understand why android removed the ability to easily set notifications per app and per contact. my blackberry and my first android were great for that
now my phone just lives on silent and I’ll maybe respond to somebody within a few days
It certainly made you practice your manners if you were talking to the dad of your crush.
“Hey Gramps, be a good little sheepshagger and get me Madam Fuckalicious on the horn, will ya?”
I see you also grew up in the phone call era
Greetings, fellow geezer!
get me Madam Fuckalicious
so disappointed that this wasn’t the username of op or the person you are replying to
It’s free. You can have it.
[email protected]. It’s a gamble.
True story: As a little kid, my mom taught us to answer the phone as such, “McTubbs residence, Fudgy speaking.” I still carry that etiquette to this day.
Fishmonger, I’d like to speak to your daughter
click. Buzzing tone
I would like 3 halibut please! Delivered to my doorstep
If you wanted to call someone, you first pick up the receiver and listen. You might suddenly be eavesdropping on another person’s call, and you might try to convince them to hang up right there in the call.
Teenagers would beg their parents to get them a second line so they could talk to their friends without getting interrupted.
On a more rare occasion, someone might have left the receiver off the hook. When you do that, it would make a terrible racket for a short while, then it would give up. So if you needed the phone, you’d pick up the receiver and nothing would happen. You had to go through the house to each phone and make sure it was hung up.
That last bit reminds me of a prank that my friends and I used to play in high school in the 90s. We would make a Beigebox, which is just a normal landline phone with alligator clips on the cord instead of the normal connector. You could use the alligator clips to attach the beigebox to someone’s phone line from the exterior of their house, at the phone junction box. We would do this, take the phone off the hook and hide it. Their phone would be tied up until they found and disconnected it. Sometimes it would take them days (or contacting the phone company from another line) to find the issue. If we were feeling particularly malicious, we would dial internationally or a 900 number instead of just leaving it off the hook.
Reading this back now, I feel like to Gen Z this prank reads like “In the previous century, I would play a naughty trick by filling the chamber pot of mine enemy with adobe so that it cannot be cleaned.”
That’s not a prank. That could ruin someone’s life. What if some relative was dying and the victim didn’t find out because you cut their phone line?
What if they needed to call 000(911) in an emergency?
I wouldn’t see this as a joke, man.
I mean, this is some pretty hardcore catastrophizing. You’re absolutely right, both of those scenarios are possible, but incredibly unlikely. At the time and place this happened, it was pretty common for phone lines to be busy or unavailable, they would call back with important news. People also knew and interacted with their neighbors, who would help if they heard someone shouting.
Most pranks aren’t things that make you laugh, they’re mostly teenagers being pieces of shit.
You kinda missed one of the major reasons of why phreakers built the beigeboxes. We used them to find lines that were connected to the phone company switches but not hooked up to any subscriber, so that we could make expensive calls that nobody would have to pay for. For example, long-distance or Internet dialup.
The beigebox was basically just a DIY Lineman’s Handset (LMHS), a common tool used by telco workers for troubleshooting when doing field work.
We also did that.
There are cool pranks. But this is just being a piece of shit. It’s as funny as flattening a tire.
A big part of being a teenager is being a piece of shit. If it makes you feel better, I realized that my friends doing this never stopped being pieces of shit and I cut them out of my life.
You’re my hero.
I begged my mother for a second line…. But it was for my modem. So i could stay online longer lol
Did she get you a second line?
nope heh
bummer
One time I answered a fax.
I’ve done that, too, and I even was on the other side of that a few times. You go to send a fax, and it has a speaker so you can hear it connect, but instead, you hear a person’s voice saying hello. Feels bad. Not all faxes had speakers like that, so I probably did it more often than I know about.
I think what’s your describing was called a “party line”. My grandma had one of those, and when an incoming call was for her, the bell would ring two times. If it rang one time, it was for her neighbor.
What I am describing is one line to one house, but with multiple phone jacks inside the house.
A party line was the same thing, but with one line shared for multiple houses.
You had to have multiple jacks, because the phone cord was only so long. No one wants to go running through the house to get to the phone before it stops ringing.
Are they not building houses with phone jacks anymore? I mean, I know “no one” has a landline, but not even the wiring?
I wouldn’t pay an electrician to wire R45 through the house in 2026, that seems pointless. Even if I had a house phone it’d be VoiP
I think you meant RJ11. Ethernet uses RJ45.
But that’s just the jack. Either can use CAT5/6/7 cabling and most RJ11 in more recent homes is still CAT5 or better. But that doesn’t mean the builders didn’t staple it to the studs making it worthless for anything more than 10BASE-T (if even that).
Yes, thank you. I wasn’t aware that cat 6 could carry a phone signal but I don’t see why not, just use fewer leads?
Yep! Four twisted pairs. Each can carry a phone line. Tip and ring!
Might be worth having someone run cat6e in a similar fashion though. I had it done in my previous house and it was glorious.
Mine had some wiring for it when i moved in in 2014, but we never used it and removed them as we came across them since we knew its not needed ever again at this point. Same with coax for cable tv which we did use for a few years but switched to streaming and from what i see even cable boxes are just wifi and connect back to the demarc point were they installed the main box. Only one we kept was the coax coming into the house for internet which is or can still be used for now.
With that said i absolutely want to run CAT6 cable through the house were the basement has 1 spot with a switch that has 1 feed to the main floor back to the demarc and same for the 1st floor. I hate wifi and sure its great for phones and stuff, but if i can have my tv streaming boxes, pcs, and gaming consoles on wired then i absolutely will do that instead. As someone who works in IT, the number one complaint i see is employees working from home and cant figure out why voip calls or meetings sound awful until i point out their terrible wifi situation from either not being close enough to it or still using that 10 year old service provider all in one router.
The house I’m living in is over 10 years old and has zero phone jacks.
Also, eventually people got those cordless phones to get around the cord length/tangling problem.
My childhood home (where I currently live) is 50 years old. Not only is there a phone jack in the kitchen wall, but the master bedroom has a 4-ft phone line coming out of the wall. Like, a literal permanent line. There’s a plastic box on the wood trim next to the floor and the line is spliced and wired into that box. If the line breaks, we need to pull off the box and splice a new cable to the connectors inside.
That line used to be connected to a small rotary dial phone, but the phone was removed years ago.
Also, the kitchen originally had a large rotary dial phone hanging on the wall when I was a kid. I’m a millennial (in my early 40s), but my parents had kids late in their life, so they’re really old (my dad isn’t a boomer; he’s actually from the silent generation!). So they grew up with rotary phones, and thus I grew up with one too.
Also, eventually people got those cordless phones to get around the cord length/tangling problem.
My parents solved this problem by buying a 15-ft phone cord for the kitchen phone. You could wander anywhere in the kitchen, dining room, and a few steps into the living room from the kitchen phone.
I have OCD and was obsessed with untangling the curly phone lines, so my family never had to worry about that.
When touch tone phones came out, the phone companies had this brilliant idea to scam more money out of people and charged extra to use touch tone. So, my parents didn’t want to pay for that and used rotary phones long after they went out of fashion. And even the touch tone phones they bought had a switch to set them to “dial pulse” mode.
I still remember some guests’ looks of astonishment when they went to dial a number and the phone didn’t make the expected noise. Some even had no idea how a rotary phone worked.
The aggressive thing was not covering the receiver when yelling at your brother, who wasn’t even home “it’s your gf, you in?” Wait a few seconds then yell “no, the one with the big ears” and a few seconds later inform the poor girl on the phone that your brother wasn’t available.
In the very early days of the Internet, if your mom’s friend called to gossip it meant you had to reset the 5 hour countdown on downloading that single image.
MOMMMMM!!!
Happy mother’s day all
The edging was INSANE back then.
We didn’t have call waiting, so for us it was literally just no using the internet before 9pm because you didn’t know who might call
For those too young to know, call waiting is standard now your phone tells you when you get a call while on another call, but this used to be a paid upgrade feature and if you didn’t have it, the person calling you would get a busy signal (instead of ringing it would just beep) and you had no way to know.
You could pick up a second phone in the house and listen in, whilst not breathing
Some phones, you could unscrew the covers on the microphone and the earpiece. And then you could just take the microphone out, because it wasn’t wired in, it was just a loose piece that sat on contacts kind of like AA batteries.
Before caller ID came along, call waiting and three-way calling were a new thing for a while. I had one of the old Mickey mouse phones, and you could unscrew and take out the microphone on that one. So me and a buddy would take the phone book, pick two numbers at random, and then using three-way calling I would call each one of them as quick as I could, and then listen in as two strangers called each other. You got arguments, and accusations, and a couple of times a guy hitting on a girl who had no idea how he got her number etc. blah blah. I was certain I was a prank genius.
Later I started getting a bit more inventive like having two pizza places call each other, etc. But the best one was, in the white pages I found a Mr so and so Junior, and a Mr so and so Senior. I made those two houses call each other, and both houses were full of people, and they got into a big argument over who called who and they kept passing the phone around saying hey let me let you talk to your dad he’ll tell you what’s up blah blah and we’re just sitting there laughing and laughing. That one went on a while.
Caller ID came along pretty soon after that and the fun was over.
Don’t do it for too long though because you’ll die
Lost my sister this way. RIP Becky.
And your neighbors too, if you had a Party Line.
The prank answers! I miss the prank answers!
“Grapefruit’s Mortuary, you stab 'em, we slab 'em. Some go to heaven, some go to hello?”
I usually go with the old tried and true, “Bart’s crematorium you kill 'em we gril em”
I always knew this saying:
you kill 'em we grill 'em
as Bart’s Roadside Cafe slogan. Usually seen on plaques in the tourist trap shops in vacation towns.
A good friend of mine regularly answers the phone like this.
My best friend and I always answer eathother’s calls with “Marco”.
Polo?
STOP CALLING HERE!
…
hello?
Honestly it was pretty horrible when I think about it. Both my parents were very active in sports clubs and had jobs that involved getting a lot of calls at home. I had to answer the phone several times a day, yell, take notes when my parents weren’t home and wasn’t allowed to be on the phone for “too long” because someone else could call.
Not covered in this image: having to learn how to be more discreet in your tweens and teens. You told your dad’s boss that dad “couldn’t come to the phone right now” and took a message, not that he was dropping a hot deuce and had run out of toilet paper.
Telemarketing did ruin it. This was the main reason people bought answering machines, to screen calls. Missing calls wasn’t a big deal for most people, it was the telemarketing that drove people to buy answering machines, and then to get caller ID, and the ability to block calls, etc. Telemarketing was a boon for the phone service providers.
If you’re anxious about answering your phone it all started with telemarketing.
It’s amazing how communication mediums seem to become so saturated by marketing that it essentially destroys them.
Phone calls, mail, fax, email.
At the very least, I’m extremely disappointed in the government for destroying phone calls (or standing back and just letting them get destroyed). The nature of a phone network lends itself well to placing responsibility on the caller. Absolutely enforceable. No will to do so.
Like, you actually need a permit to do door to door sales. That’s GOOD. Copy-paste that legislation for phones.
I’d be 100x happier with my tax dollars hunting down and punishing phone abusers than funding a speed trap.
Don’t forget the entire internet, newspapers, telephone listings, radio, television, movies, video games, every surface of a store, public spaces like parks and sidewalks, and probably your dreams in the near future
Advertising is cancer and it destroys anything that tolerates it for even a moment. An industry with zero ethics or morals. If you work in advertising you’re a disgusting scumbag piece of shit and your parents are ashamed. No amount of money is worth it and the world would be objectively better without you in it.
I think like pretty much every industry, it will push whatever the boundaries of legality are to maximize profit. I think advertising in particular has none of the public interest guardrails that every other industry has. I think I could be cool with advertising as a concept if there were actual limits.
I’m pretty sure in my lifetime someone is going to somehow put an advertisement on the surface of the moon and the world will collectively and righteously lose thier shit. Why wait?
Advertising should be illegal outside very specific instances, imo.
When a person needs a thing, they should seek it out.
That we’re constantly bombarded by marketing is not spoken of enough as the tragedy that it truly is.
I am so fucking mad email is ruined by telemarketing. It would be so fucking convenient if not for spam. Kinda hate that it’s how you sign up to anything now too like some weird id.
Eeh, we didn’t have telemarketers in this part of the globe, still hate answering the phone.
To be fair, we do have phone spam now, just not in the landline era.
There were some benefits, like when I would skip school and they would call home and leave a message for my dad about it and I would be able to delete the message without him ever knowing about it.
Yep. My parents always appreciated me answering the phone in the evening and telling the “telemarketers” to stop calling, so they didn’t have to get up from the couch.
A shared family phone line was basically social roulette. You never knew if you were answering for gossip, business, or pure disaster.
Yeah and sometimes, before my voice broke, I would be mistaken for my older sister when her boyfriend called. Which was awkward for everybody involved.
I too got a story like this: My sibling’s partner confused us - not to blame him, we do sound alike. I picked up and he gleefully invited me on a date. I deadpan handed the phone to my sibling.
Ahhh. Memories.
- Me at 11yr answering phone: “hello? I AM NOT <moms name>!!!
- Me at 16yr answering phone: “hello? I AM NOT <dad’s name>!!!
And:
- Also me: “MOM PHONE FOR YOOOOUUU!!”
- Mom: <normal tone cause she’s in the room near by> “did you ask who it was!?!”
- Me: <normal tone> “who’s calling please? <yelling>Mom, it’s Debbie!!!”
And lastly:
Kids will never get to experience the thrill of talking to your girlfriend about tonight while your little sister gets on the phone in the basement and makes “make out noises” loudly before giggling and hanging up.
My partner seems to exclusively communicate by yelling to me from other rooms/floors in the house.
So that yelling lives on.
Maybe get an intercom
And there would be one phone centrally located in the house, usually in the kitchen. If you were lucky the phone cord would be long enough to stretch into a closet or something where you could close the door and have a modicum of privacy. Otherwise everyone nearby would get an earful of your conversation. And you couldn’t chase your annoying siblings away because the phone line was too short.
Also, if you made plans there was no reliable way to chase anybody up. So for example on a Friday you’d all agree to meet on Saturday in town by the park at 10am, then four out of the five of you would show up, you’d wait for 5-10 minutes and if Ashley didn’t arrive you’d just be like “Well, I guess we’ll find out if she’s still alive on Monday” and then just go about your day. In theory someone could call her that evening and find out what happened, but usually nobody bothered.
There was also a brief but very confusing crossover period where you could call a friend, her Dad would answer and say she’s already on the other phone (meaning a cell phone) so you’d make chit-chat with her Dad for five minutes in case the other call finished, which it usually didn’t.
EDIT: Also I don’t know if it was the same anywhere else, but where I grew up (UK) some kids tried to call a payphone from a different payphone and reverse the charges so they could chat for free, and the police showed up and told them off lol.
