DAN’S PAPERS
danshamptons.com
June 14, 2013 Page 43
Hello, Hello How the Telephone Became the Smartphone on the east end of Long Island
A
bout 25 years ago, I wrote an article in Dan’s Papers lamenting how telephones dominated our lives. I remember it well. Telephones, I said, were the only modern convenience in our homes that demanded attention when they rang and the moment they rang. You would drop everything and run over to wherever the telephone was and, breathlessly, pick it up and say, “Hello?” On the other end, whoever it was would have your complete attention. “Why, Jane, it’s so good of you to call,” you might say. A person sitting on a sofa in the living room, who might have been in the middle of an important story they wanted you to hear, would be on hold. They could only return to where they were in the story when the call was over. No other invention had such a tyranny over everything. Cars started when you turned the key and otherwise lay idle. TVs got turned on and off. Light switches and washing machines were at your beck and call. But the phone could wake you from a deep sleep at 3 a.m. It could get you scrambling out of the bathtub to answer it soaking wet. It could get you reflexively answering a pay phone as you were walking by if there were no one in it. And then there were the occasions when you
completely altered your life when it DIDN’T ring. Perhaps the best known was waiting at home all afternoon for someone special to call, who never did. There was also a serious problem with unwanted callers. You wouldn’t even know who was interrupting your day until you picked up the phone. Often it was somebody trying to sell you something. Or sometimes it was even a crank caller. Finally, there was the fact that you could not turn the phone off. A line went directly from the wall to the phone. There was no way to remove it yourself. Only a technician could do that. Your only option was to rip the cord out of the wall. Or fling it across the room, which was never a good idea because phones were made of steel, weighed about six pounds and could cause quite a bit of damage. I’m sure people were killed by flying phones. How rude! I wrote. Why do we put up with it? This article, which I wrote in Dan’s Papers back then here on eastern Long Island, resulted just a year later in the invention of the automated answering machine. I take full credit for this. I wrote the article. The inventors began working on the problem. A year later there it was. Answering machines were, though, just a partial solution. It wouldn’t work, of course, if you forgot to turn it on. It also would work, but
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might still result in a dive for the phone even if you were with someone, if you were expecting an important call. Or if you weren’t quite sure and at first decided to let it go to the answering machine and then changed your mind. There were hospitals full of people who had banged themselves up diving for the phone, gashing their foreheads, breaking their collarbones, spraining their ankles, in desperate attempts to get to the phone before it got through its fourth ring and defaulted to the machine, or worse, got to that fourth ring and the caller had hung up. It was only later, when the cell phone came into general use, that this problem got solved completely. Many people today don’t have house phones at all anymore. I recall when the day came for me to consider chucking my house phone. I had a long conversation at that time with my house. My house pleaded for his phone. He reminded me how much good it had done me in years past. He asked me to consider all his good service. He pointed out how, if an alarm went off at the house and a security company called, his not answering it would bring help on the way. In the end, I decided to keep the house phone but remove the answering machine. With the ringer off, he could operate as a fax machine. We live with that today. When I was growing (Continued on next page)
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