You Can’t Call It Dialing Anymore

In the non-so-thriving town of Augusta, Ohio where I spent a great deal of my youth, we had a telephone of the kind that will be familiar to those of you who remember episodes of “Lassie” on TV. It was a box that hung on the wall in our hall, had a mouthpiece sticking out of it, a receiver that hung on a hook on its left side that served to gain the line for calls, and a crank on the right side with which to summon whomever you wanted to talk to. Our phone number was 13 F 3. That meant we were on line 13 and that when the phone rang three long rings, the call was for us. Our neighbor’s number was 13 F 2. If we wanted to speak to her, we picked up the receiver, and cranked two long rings. She would dutifully answer the phone if she were at home. This was in the 1950s, by the way, and not, as you might imagine by now, the 1890s.

The phone company was located in Pattersonville, some six or so miles away, and owned by the redoubtable Nellie Wilson whose help was necessary if you wanted to make a long distance call. Nellie could be brought into service if you cranked up one long ring. Occasionally, the lines were down between the central office and our town, sometimes owing to bad weather (snow and ice broke them) or because they lay behind the targets of a popular shooting range and were shot in two from time to time. In either case, Nellie’s husband Fred would get them fixed and service would be restored. Even if the lines to Nellie’s switchboard were down, you could still crank up the neighbor’s phone. She lived across the street from us.

Here we are, a mere fifty years from those days of simple telephoning, and the variety of phone service bewilders even the most astute and up-to-date among us. I-Pod technology presents its users with hundreds of downloadable options, including thousands of CDs, films, games, text messaging, GPS capability, and oh yes, somewhere among this array, a telephone with which you can actually talk to somebody else if you want—and if they want you to. These many possibilities have created a new set of telephone habits and mores, some of them more annoying than others.

There has arisen among us the owners of cell phones who have developed a number of tricks to deal with incoming calls. The first of these is forgetting to turn the phone on, or purposefully not turning it on. That makes incoming calls go to ‘voice mail’ which may or may not satisfy you as the caller—probably not, since you likely had some good reason to phone the person in the first place. The last thing you want when you had in mind actually speaking voice to voice with the person, is to be sent to the dark dungeon of ‘voice mail’ where messages languish in dark and dank cells, awaiting the good pleasure of the lord of the manor who may or may not ‘get back to you’.

My friend Craig has a tenant who refuses to answer his phone, even for the most pressing of reasons, concerning, for instance, the delivery of a dishwasher that the tenant has longed to have installed. Instead of simply pushing the green button on his cell phone and saying “Hello”, he ignores Craig’s calls and then sends back a text message. Why he prefers this is anyone’s guess, but it’s damned inconvenient for Craig at times.

I rather prefer the system that another friend has always used. He has no answering device of any kind (never owned a TV either—never needed one) and never has had. His reasoning is that if the phone rings at his house over and over, that tells the caller that he is not at home. If he is at home, he religiously answers his phone. That seems to me to be a sensible way to deal with things; at least, you know where you stand.

But this hiding out via one’s cell phone is just downright rude. The same person who does this will invariably load you up with his business cards when he sees you in person, imploring you to phone soon for whatever reason. Then when you are nice enough to take him up on his invitation to call, you get his voice mail, or he sends a text message, or nothing at all.

There will be those among you who will argue with me about this, no doubt stating cogent reasons that have to do with the right of everyone to receive calls or not. I have no very good argument in rebuttal, and at the risk of treading on the guarantees to privacy that the Constitution seems to provide, I offer only this, perhaps very lame, reply. I won’t phone you unless a) you’ve asked me to, b) you’ve phoned me first, and c) it’s important that we talk. That said, I’d appreciate it if you’d pick up the phone when I call so that I can hear your lovely voice and therefore verify that you yet live among us, and that you are not a slave to the electronic marvels that might be taking over for you.

Nellie Wilson is long gone and with her, the phone system and the ugly wooden box with the crank that we couldn’t wait to replace with a phone that had a dial on its front. When we finally did get such a phone and were able with one number, the zero, to summon long distance unaided, we thought, “Tomorrow, the world!” We had no idea what was in store.

--Robert Heylmun