Pluggers by Rick McKee for April 28, 2022

yikes… like say from Port Angeles, Washington, USA to Tashkent, Uzbekistan for example? (not that I’ve done such a call)

First thing that popped into my head, Sylvia’s Mother. Pluggers will get it.

There’s an extra charge if you have a spare battery…

Long distance relationships are so much cheaper these days.

I still worry about roaming charges.

Time of day doesn’t matter on phones anymore either, but the smart electric meter charges more to do laundry midday.

When I moved to Arizona, there was one town between me and my parents, making it a long distance call. It was 30 cents. My Mother wouldn’t call unless it was really important.

My original 30 minutes a month cell phone plane is still embedded in the back of my mind. Casually making international calls is still a giddy experience.

Is it past 7 PM?

Some of us pluggers remember making a long distance person-to-person call and asking for yourself. Lets the family know you arrived safely at no cost.

I can never remember this country code thing. And it’s not like I call overseas. :)

If you still make voice calls, you’re a Plugger!

I did ask my grandkids if the term, “hang up the phone” is still in use. It is. The old hand gesture of the pinky finger and thumb being extended to signify a phone held up to your ear as in “call me” is now just a flat hand to the ear.

Years of walking around with change in my pockets from sundry military base phone banks, making calls to a home-town girlfriend, only to find out later that she was preggers by a 4-F beer-buddy…

That was one thing I never worried about that much. If I needed to make a call, I did. If I didn’t, I didn’t. I didn’t drive myself to distraction figuring out how to make it cost the least.

Our landline (which we were forced in 2020 – mid pandemic – to change from copper wire to fiber optic*) has the same service it always has had – pay by the minute for all calls, local or long distance. We only call out to 800 numbers or other free calls on it. We get calls in on it (mostly spam – and we must get at least 3 calls a month). When we make outgoing calls we use my cell phone as I have unlimited calls. Husband’s phone is rather limited in call allowance.

Over all between spam calls in, calls we make out (including that once a week call to my mom) and real calls in – on all 3 lines combined we must deal with a dozen calls total in a month. We also have a Magic Jack line for husband’s counseling business – thought it is all done online – no clients calling him as he planned when he bought it, so it is used as our fax line. (Why a fax line these days? Believe it or not I have to use it several times a year for various clients when their brokers did not send them their statements and they need to send to me to do their taxes – and they always ask if I have a fax for them to send to. )

In the 30 plus years we have lived in this house and had copper wiring phone service we have never had the wiring go bad. In less than a year the fiber optic wire shredded and we lost phone service and I had to go through a hazing from the phone company for them to talk to me (do you know the exact day your phone service started at your house – they needed me to tell same to identify it was really us) and send someone to fix it – a week later. (This is the same as the incandescent light bulbs that last us about 9 months each and the LED bulbs which last maybe 6 months before going bad. Progress?)