W
After we went back and forth for a few years about ditching the house phone, the 2016 presidential primary put us over the top. No, it wasn’t Trump — it was the whole lot of them. For months, our phone was jangling nightly with calls from real and dubious pollsters, and lackies of all stripes. In the runup to the primary, the calls rattled us four or five times a night.
We contributed to the auditory ugliness, using the answering machine as a screener, with the sound up loud so we could grab the receiver if friends or loved ones called. We heard our default answering message repeatedly: “HELLO … AFTER THE TONE, PLEASE LEAVE A MESSAGE.” It sounded like an evil robot butler. Some callers left recorded messages, some hung up, some uttered confused, sad words: “Hello, hello?”
Along with the political hullabaloo was the usual scammer bait: messages from the phony IRS about phony tax bills, calls from Annoying Credit Services Inc. about reducing interest rates, calls from “Microsoft” headquarters, apparently now in India, about troubles with our Windows software (We long ago switched to Macs), hangups from telemarketers of all sorts.
The ratio of nuisance calls to real ones was about 10 to 1. It was a landslide.
Yet, it was hard to say goodbye. We have lived at our home in West Lebanon for more than 30 years and we liked our phone number. It ended with -5557, so easy to remember that it would have been good for a bar or a taxi company.
Every year, I looked us up in the new phone book, to make sure we hadn’t been omitted, and maybe for existential assurance that we are still here. As one phone book gave way to another, the print grew smaller and smaller. “Danl and Denise Mackie” is how they listed us, (only people who are old enough to have seen the Daniel Boone show are allowed to call me Dan’l).
Our history with Fairpoint, our landline provider, was not good. When it took over from Verizon, it fouled up our monthly bill and couldn’t fix it for more than a year. A faithful service person in Maine, with whom I came to be on a first-name basis, manually fixed it every month. She even emailed a New Year’s message expressing hopes that the glitch would soon be fixed. Auld acquaintances aside, we have since lost touch.
And then, just before the recent primary season, our monthly bill went up suddenly. I called, and Fairpoint said it had been charging us the wrong rate. It was bad timing for the phone, which was already in disrepute. “That thing is going to go,” said my bookkeeper wife, who, as a matter of principle, insists on accuracy in billing.
Our children slowly lured us into the world of cellphones. I still remember my daughter lending us one on a road trip some years ago; as Dede and I drove down the highway, the thing went off. I picked it up and hollered, “HOW DO YOU ANSWER IT?”
“I DON’T KNOW,’’ Dede replied, and we passed it back and forth as if it were a live grenade.
But now we each have cell phones, and answering them is less of an event. We try hard to bring them with us every day. (My son, who was riding a high horse at the time, once accused my wife of being “an irresponsible cell phone user,’’ because she’d misplaced it for days at a time — but we still had a landline then).
Young people don’t appreciate how difficult it is for someone who was not brought up with a cellphone to treat one as an inseparable friend. I am perfectly fine with not being able to be reached for hours. Through most of my life, only doctors and the like were constantly on call, but now we are as well.
We are managing with our little phones, but I feel a little untethered. Our landline was like one of those thick ropes that tie a boat snugly against a dock. But we are in a brave new world. What if my call drops, in a forest, perhaps, and I speak and no one hears me? Will I be making a sound?
Hello? Hello?
Dan Mackie can be reached at dmackie@vnews.com
