The phone is dead. Long live the phone.
Our ‘home phone’… cripes. Let’s just stop there. I remember the days when it was just ‘the phone’ – now we have the home phone, the business phone, husband’s mobile, my mobile… It’s ridonkulous really.
Last week I went to walk the dog – a 30 minute scurry around soggy fields. I left without my phone in my pocket. Remembered when I got to the garden gate, thought about going back, but with a heaving hairy elephant desperate to be off I couldn’t be bothered to do so. I have never, not once, used my mobile phone while walking the dog out of necessity – I take the odd photo, and occasionally call my sister for a catch up. That’s it. So I confidently carried on regardless.
Naturally I spent the soggy 30 minutes feeling vaguely worried at the back of my brain, like I’d left the gas on or something. I’m no phone addict – anyone who has tried to call or text me knows it takes at least 3 days for me to find the phone from the bottom of my bag/coat/car and reply – but it’s the knowing that it’s there.
How did we get to that?
Anyhoo, I digress. The ‘home phone’ is on the blink. Refusing to play the messages it has stored while we’ve been out, and (even more annoyingly) blurping a couple of rings when no one is calling. Just a couple mind – enough for you to have levered yourself out of the chair you have just sat in, but not enough to make it to the phone before it cuts off and sits innocently eyeing you in astonishment when you start to swear at it. Again.
So I was checking out cordless phones by Gigaset – and seriously. It’s been a VERY long time since I bought a landline. I was expecting to be baffled by technology. But lo. The new landline looks like… an old landline. No really, it does!
I understand what they’re talking about (I usually drop the handset and go and make a cup of tea while the man-from-my-mobile-contract is wooing me with all the clever fandangle a new mobile phone can do). It has a decent range (as in, how far can you walk around the garden before you start sounding like you’re in a tunnel? We once had a phone that wouldn’t reach to the far end of the living room. Useless.), the buttons are sensible and number-based. It has an answerphone that I can set because it works the way our answerphones have always worked.
I still miss the gentle burrrr-ing of the rotary dial, and I definitely miss winding the curly phone line round my fingers. But the new cordless phones are still simple and straightforward to use. And that, ladies and gentleman, makes me very happy. It also means my small black fruit-based phone will continue to loiter in the bottom of my bag/coat/car.
