• Health
• Money
• Leisure
• Make a Difference
• Family
• Online Community
• Membership

  Since I live far away from my elderly parents, I stay in contact with them by phone. About a year ago, my mother took a nasty fall when she got up from her easy chair to answer my phone call. The conversation went like this:

"How are you, mom?"

"I don’t think I broke anything, but I’m going to have a big knot on my forehead."

"What happened?"

"I tripped over the cord when I got up to answer the phone, and I hit my head on the corner of the table when I fell. Don’t worry. I think I’m going to be alright. Is anything wrong?"

"No, I just called to make sure you were okay."

"I was fine until I got up to answer the phone."

I wallowed in guilt for the rest of the day, and started plotting the demise of the phone cord.

To understand the telephone wars that were brewing, you need to know that my parents never saw any reason to give up a telephone that was still working. They retired their 1960’s model black rotary dial phone only when Ma Bell sent her henchmen out to collect it after the breakup of the behemoth in 1984. 

 www.youtube.com/watch

For anyone who is not old enough to remember, before 1984, the phone company owned all the phones that were connected to their phone service, and customers rented the phones on a monthly basis. Customers were not permitted to purchase and connect their own phones. If you purchased your own company approved phone and connected it, you only owned the outer shell. The phone company still owned the working parts of the phone by definition, no matter how much a customer paid for it. After the breakup, the phone company went out to private homes and collected the company supplied phones from anyone who had not already replaced them.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2006-09-14-phone_x.htm

I’m calling this battle one in the saga of the phone wars, but there were preliminary skirmishes that preceded it. The involuntary surrender of the company owned rotary phone was skirmish number one. It resulted in the loss of the beloved rotary phone and the permanent demise of a beautiful phone I had previously purchased for them as a gift. The phone company henchman insisted that we only owned the shell of the phone, no matter how much we paid for it nor where we bought it, so he ripped out the interior working parts of the phone and took them prisoner of the phone company.

 A decade later, after a fall when getting out of bed to answer a night time phone call, my parents gave in and allowed the installation of a second phone jack in their bedroom. In a world that is now strewn with phone paraphenalia in every room, most cars and most pockets and purses, it’s hard to remember the times when families had only one phone in the house, one telephone jack and one telephone number, which only required dialing seven digits.