Telephony

One thing that amazes me is that in my lifetime we have gone from a world in which every phone call was a simple, perfect thing — you dialed (yes, dialed) the phone, the call went through. If someone was there, they answered and you talked. You didn’t get cut off, voices didn’t fade in and out, calls weren’t lost because you turned your head. If no one was there. you got a busy signal. Not an answering machine, not voice mail, not call waiting. You just had to try again another time. Now I happen to think that answering machines, voicemail and, above all, caller ID are some of the greatest inventions of the last century, because I really don’t love the telephone and the built-in assumption that the telephone is the supreme instrument that must be answered, that I need to drop whatever else I am doing whenever it rings.

But we have traded that old world for one in which no call is clear, you can never be sure if you’re going to be able to finish a conversation, where people’s attention is diverted by the promise (or hope) of a better call on the other line, And for that privilege we’re willing to pay a monthly fee that the old phone companies could only have dreamed of charging.

I remember when I was growing up, it was a Very Big Thing to have a second phone (what was called an “extension” phone) put in the house. For one thing, you had to have the phone company come and do the wiring for you. (Ours was wired by a guy who worked for the phone company and did both phone wiring and household electric wiring on the side – he had also done our house wiring, and the fact that phone work didn’t really translate into the 110 volt world didn’t occur to me until years later.) Your phone, which was owned by the phone company – you rented it – was hard-wired into the jack. No modular units, no changing phones because you wanted a different color, no making the cord longer so you could move it into another room. As a teenager, I could just about pull the upstairs phone across the hall and into my room, and just about close the door so I could idle away the hours on the phone with my girlfriend. And if someone else needed to use the phone, I was out of luck.

Now, as someone who would really prefer never to use a phone, I am of course inundated with them. We still have a landline (and a big thanks to the true genius who connected caller ID to my television), with four phones scattered throughout the house; two of those are cordless. We now have three cellphones, any one of which could be going off at any time for any number of reasons, including the most annoying thing of all: junk text messages. And because that doesn’t produce enough chaos, I’m now involved in using Skype for calls on the computer with a network of business associates. (And even though it’s free, Skype still works better than the cellphone.)

Is this what Bell had in mind? A world in which you absolutely cannot be out of touch with Mr. Watson?