Early adopters are welcome to it.

This post was published in the Wilson Times Sept. 4, 2020

 

        I’ve never been much of an “early adopter,” the bold, techie types who see something new and “gotta have it.” I was more of a late adopter. I wanted someone else to work out all the glitches before I put my money down for the latest cell phone, computer or clothing style (this reluctance saved me from owning a Nehru jacket a month after the style became laughable). Further evidence: I was happily using a manual typewriter well into the 1980s.

            By claiming this distinction, I recognize that I’m the last to do many things. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be one of the last people in Wilson to do away with our “landline” phone.

Perhaps you remember that archaic machine, one that sits there, waiting for you to pick up “the receiver” and “dial” someone’s number (although actual dialing was long ago eliminated in favor of  “touch-tone” calling. Most households abandoned their antiquated dial or touch-tone phones as soon as cell phones became reliable enough to displace our old stationary phones. The phone-in-your –pocket surpassed even the fantasy device (a “wrist radio”) in the Dick Tracy comic strip of generations ago.

Our phones of today provide news, keep our calendars, predict the weather, alert us to hazards, show us how to get to our destinations, replace our tattered address books, allow us to take notes that we won’t lose in the laundry, keep track of time and time events, take pictures and video of events we witness, remind us where we’re supposed to be, and make veritable phonebooks pretty much obsolete.

Just a couple of years ago, a friend who is actually older than I, complained to me about the scourge of young people whose phone numbers don’t appear in the phonebook. Their numbers aren’t in the phonebook because they don’t have a copper wire landline, which is owned by the Phone Company, which also used to publish the Phonebook. My friend was talking about all those early adopters who had left behind the hopelessly retrograde older generation and couldn’t understand how we lived without a cell phone sutured to our hands or why we would ever take the time to look through a Phonebook (some of them thicker than a Tolstoy novel) to find a phone number or even a home address.

“How do they find anybody?” my exasperated and older friend complained about these young people who don’t have their names and addresses listed. “I wanted to send a sympathy card, but they’re not in the Phonebook, so I can’t find their address. What am I supposed to do? Just not send a card? That would be terrible.”

Leaving behind the landline is more about people not finding us than about our finding someone. Robocalls, which neither telephone companies nor Congress can quell, had become such a bother, disrupting meals, naps and conversations as well as being the only calls we ever got on the landline, that we had to do something.

We found some success in turning off the phone’s ringer, directing all calls to voicemail, which we would periodically check. We got through meals and all the other activities that phone calls had disrupted and were satisfied with the results.

Our subsequent decision to drop the landline entirely was prompted by Greenlight’s offer of more bandwidth if we would upgrade our TV connection. If we dropped the phone portion of our contract, our monthly bill would be essentially unchanged. Done deal. Our landline will be officially kaput in mid-September.