For a decade, my trusty Panasonic cordless phone/answering machine has sat on the bookcase in my living room, next to the WiFi router. Until two or three years ago, it actually served a purpose. Through a convoluted set up with various subscriptions on Skype, folk in Milwaukee could ring a Milwaukee 414 number and find themselves put through to the phone on my bookcase for the price of a local call. But we eventually migrated the sole person using this means of calling us onto messenger apps, and the Skype subscriptions were cancelled. It came as little surprise to me that Skype ceased to exist recently. Indeed, I’m amazed it lasted so long. Was it kept going just for me??
Since then, the Panasonic phone has largely been an ornament. On the rare occasion that it actually rang, it was either a scam caller, or his close relative the cold caller. I would typically answer, declare enthusiastic interest in what they had to say, but if they ‘could just wait a momentito, por favor, I’ll be right back’. I’d return a half hour later, put the phone back, and wonder how long they had waited before giving up. However long it was, it was their time wasted. Time not spent calling someone a bit more gullible than myself. A scam prevented. I considered it a civic duty.
This week though, my trusty Panasonic was unplugged and retired from service. I’ve switched my internet service over to Toob, a full fibre service. With a whopping 900mb download and upload speed, it’s a massive upgrade on my old Sky broadband, with its measly 150mb/25mb speeds. Whilst including a landline has been an (almost free) option on broadband packages for a while, the latest fancy full fibre connection doesn’t cater for such antiquated tech at all.
My Panasonic will now go into my man-drawer where – like all true blokes – I keep a vast collection of cables, plugs, adaptors, mystery boxes, wires and other such stuff. Just in case stuff. Mrs P will occasionally berate me for this seemingly pointless collection. But you never know when you might need a particular cable. Although every proper bloke who’s read this far will know that we all know exactly when we will need it – about ten minutes after it’s been thrown out.
Eventually, this obsolete detritus will fill the man-drawer to the point the door won’t shut and I will be forced to have a sort out. The Panasonic will then find itself on a one way trip to the landfill, where it will be reunited with other relics of the past. Tape cassettes, VHS recorders, DVD players, floppy disks, laser discs, pagers, dictation devices, Walkmans, paper road maps, overhead projectors and those close family members, the Yellow Pages and the fax machine.
And then I will no longer own a phone*. It’s the end of an era. Again. Which is something that seems to be happening with greater frequency the older I get.
* an iPhone or other smartphone is NOT a phone. You can argue otherwise, but you’ll be wrong. It’s a pocket computer.
The Mexile 
As far as Skype goes, I was using it right up to its demise earlier this month… weekly video calls with one of my friends in Ohio, monthly calls with my cousin in England, and occasional calls with other friends. Now I have migrated to Teams.
Although this dinosaur has a cell phone, I still dislike them. Landlines have a much better connection, and I do not need to have a mini-computer with me at all times.
Oh, and I still have and use my DVD player. In fact, I just finished making a DVD of my photos from last year’s trip to Switzerland.
¡Vivan los dinosaurios!
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Some people would add vinyl records to that list, but they are making quite a comeback. CDs less so. But there’s always someone using antiques in lieu of 21st century gear, not just you. Bizarrely, £100 million transfer day deals for football players are still done by fax. I have a friend who insists on paying for things using these colourful pieces of fabric that he calls ‘cash’. And somewhere in the world, I guarantee, there is a stubborn shop keeper totalling up groceries with an abacus…
Vivian los dinosaurios indeed!
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Oh, and I still have my CDs and CD player. And I just got back from the handicraft market to buy presents for friends back in Ohio, and I paid for everything in cash. As you know, there are plenty of situations here in Mexico where cash is still king.
🙂
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It’s definitely fair to say that cash is more prevalent in Mexico than in the UK. It’s far from dead here. But it’s not what most people use for day to day spending.
Although this reminds me, I must order some Mexican pesos….!
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I recall the days when my Ham friends came ’round with portable radios with DIY DTMF pads attached and could make free callsover the air. Jeez I was stupid not to get involved !!
iPones or smartphoes are not real phones, I agree, they are glorified two way radios.
I spent many an hour with my scanner listening in. Got some great chuckles.
P.S.
It is not illegal where I live. It is frowned upon by local LEOs but that is all.
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My brother was into ham radios in London in the 80s. This involved the installation of a big mast on the roof of our family home, and the disappearance of my brother into his room for pretty much the rest of his teenage years. Which just goes to show, smartphones haven’t made kids these days more anti-social than all their predecessors….
🙂
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My brother Simon rip, the other one, the first didn’t make it past the post used to intone on his home phone once the salutations were done with and when the caller had gushed a rushed order for pizza..
“City Morgue how can I direct your call?”
The brother had had a second hand phone line as yet unpurged from the recent memories of previous users of said pizza parlour. He had this mischievous side to him when he wasn’t siphoning off his Southern Comfort and rolling cigarettes. He wasn’t past putting on the grand either and the colonials lapped it up! Unfortunately his playful remarks would deteriorate into Dublinese banter once his consummation gathered speed.
I digress, we have three Panasonic handheld devices one in her ladies chamber and the others dispersed to the kitchen and sitting room. The batteries are actually really good and perhaps worth more than the apparatus itself being rechargeable triple AAs.
I unhooked our landline recently from its socket after a flood of Chinese pretenders telling me my Ma Bell account was overdue, an errant Amazon package needed more money and my nephew needed cash to get home from Africa, that thirteen year old really gets around I tell ya.
Peace and tranquility at last!
It’s amazing really how things have changed. My mum was a teacher and she had an aunt in Scotland an uncle in Manchester and a sister in Lagos and my father had a sister in California and another in London. So we got a telephone, other than a phone kiosk that was always vandalised no one else had one in the neighbourhood other than the doctor perhaps.
Unfortunately it was no secret and everyone and their dog would knock on the door to call someone somewhere promising to pay and that came to a head very quickly. We got some really extraordinary bills and seldom got fully paid and then one of the perpetrators started to threaten us and accused us of being money grabbers. So I moved the phone upstairs from the hall and when people came to use it we told them that we had had the phone removed due to unpaid bills, white lies of course. That didn’t go down well either.
Those calls to Africa were a lesson in themselves as each operator connected across the continent from Dublin to London, hold on please to Paris to Madrid to Morocco humming and whistling until we heard the sweet tones of aunty in her delightful home on the other side of the world.
The telephone you see was much more than the sum of its parts as it transported us into the future with each breath we took and although Lagos, a mere 7544 miles away from Dublin we could converse as if we were in the next room or across the table.
Back to the brother, well he was an early adopter of cellular eventually settling with the trusty Nokia for a number of years. He was chief of security for a phone company, using his scruffy appearance as a cover used to take up security positions to discover fraud. He was quite successful however he was always on call or maybe that was his way of getting out of social gatherings. Our mother threw parties all the time and guess got stuck with washing dishes?
He had a saying “It’s enough to put you off your Rice Krispies”
My sons will eventually find my tech drawer with its collection of Samsung chargers, obsolete remote controls and assorted computer parts fans and wires. Perhaps they will have come back into fashion like vinyl by then!
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I take huge pleasure in answering scam calls with a ‘Hello, Oxford Police Station/MI6/Jones Hitman Services…..if it is a family member you need killed, press 1 now. If it is a non family member, press 2 now…’
If only I were in the US. There’s scope for all sorts of high jinks. ‘Hello, you have been automatically diverted to ICE to discuss your eligibility to remain in the US. Press 1 now to self deport. Press 2 now for more information about El Salvador…’
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A pal of mine has a referee whistle, he speaks very quietly and asks them to turn the volume up at their end and…
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Quality!
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