Grand Avenue by Mike Thompson for October 17, 2015

“And my gosh, what are you supposed to do with the end of this cord?” “Maybe that’s how you’re supposed to carry it.”

Where are the buttons, how do you dial this thing? Where is the power button to turn it on.

It was a lovely device. It would stay put and not want to be carried around to annoy you and everyone around you. And it didn’t matter, because it turns out that there’s nothing so urgent that you have to be enslaved to a device. I mean, if you need to make an urgent call, just use a convenient phone booth.

Try slamming down your smartphone…

For that I have no idea.

Bakelite! That’s the future….

We used to have two landlines which came in on copper underground.Sometimes mice would invade an upline relay box and chew the wires where they went to ground.Verizon always tried to say it was inside our house.If they sent out a tech, they would invariably leave flummoxed.We had a mongrel in-house phone system combining both our house and business lines onto six different extensions – three were two line digital phones, one was a single line digital and the other two were rotary phones.It worked without a hitch but some of the younger phone techs had never even seen a rotary phone.

We had a great device for texting, it was called Pen and Paper. it was great, you can change fonts as you go and there wasn’t a limit on characters. The only drawback was you had to be patient, as it might take a few weeks to get a text reply, but if it’s important you get a voice reply fairly quick if needed.

Best thing about that phone is that just the weight of the cord won’t pull it off the desk.