I tried to make a phone call but the line was dead. No dial tone, no nothing. Diane and I checked our four phones–two on the First Floor, one on the Second Floor, one in the basement–but they were all dead.
Diane used her iPhone to call Verizon Customer Service. We were told there was an “Area Wide Outage” and service would be restored in THREE DAYS!!!
Do you still have a landline? Are you thinking of dropping it?
I haven’t had a land line for at least 15 years.
Steve, most of our friends have “cut the cord” and rid themselves of their landline phones.
We have “landlines” in Germany and Hungary – with the same phone nr in Germany over almost 50 years.
But now they are connected via the internet cable.
OT:
My German phone nr which ist still in the phonebook went into several lists for spamming it seems many years ago so I have it connected straight to the answering machine in my former “home office”. The numbers added later by ISDN (you could have 10 numbers, like one for each family member) are only known to family, friends and business partners.
Totally OT:
Today we have elections for the local parliament in the state of Baden-Württemberg, of course I voted by letter several weeks ago already.
And it looks like we’ll keep our Green prime minister – The Greens will probably again get more than 30% of the votes!
Btw Baden-Württemberg is the home state of Bosch, Mercedes, Porsche and many other internationally known companies …
How’s that?
Wolf, we have a weird hybrid phone system with cell towers, traditional phone lines, and internet phones. And, of course, there are always problems.
Our landline is mostly used to not answer scam calls.
The other morning I got three such calls before 8 am! I was annoyed enough to answer them. The first one (6:30j was a recording that said “We are not available right now. Leave your number and we’ll call you back.” The second was from “Microsoft” and I yelled at him for waking me up at 7:30. At 7:45 it was “Annie” from “Microsoft,” complete with Indian accent. “No you’re not,” I said, “and don’t you have clocks that tell you what time it is in the time zones you’re calling? It’s TOO EARLY!” And I hung up.
I don’t know why we still have a landline.
Jeff, those scam calls seem to be a problem everywhere – I was kind of astonished that you experience them so often in the USA.
In Europe the “favourite” scam is a US soldier who is lonely, stationed in Afghanistan eg and wants to talk to you, exchange messages etc – and then needs money to be able to visit you …
But it happens the other way round too.
An acquaintance (can’t call him a friend) in my age group (over 75), Austrian but living in Hungary told us that a very nice and good looking woman from the USA had fallen in love with him – she was around 40 years old!
So he sent her money, first for her mother’s medical treatment, then for the ticket to Hungary – and waited for hours at the Budapest airport …
Can you imagine that???
They will try whatever way they can to separate you from your money — and it works often enough that it’s worthwhile to do it. If people wouldn’t fall for it, they’d stop doing it.
Wolf, I had a call (back when we had our landline) from a “friend” who was in London and had his passport and money (supposedly) stolen. As far as I knew, he was in New Jersey at the time, so I let him know that he was “calling” me from England. Needless to say, it wasn’t him.
Amazing how many people can fool themselves by wanting to believe it is real, like your acquaintance.
Jeff, allegedly, landlines are “more secure” and “more resilient” in a weather emergency. I’m skeptical. Also, about 90% of our landline phone calls are either robo-calls or people calling to beg for money.
I’ve kept a landline because as useful as smartphones are, I hate talking on them, especially on long calls. However, the landline limits incoming calls to 20 numbers I’ve selected. My cellphone is a newish iPhone that has a feature you can turn on in Settings that silences incoming calls that are not from numbers in my Contacts or have called from my phone. These calls go directly to voicemail and my phone doesn’t ring. If the call is legit I can always return the call. The end result is that I never have to deal with junk calls.
Michael, it takes me about one second to deal with “junk” calls. Like you, I prefer holding the receiver on a traditional BELL phone rather than talking on a cell phone for any length of time.
Going back to Wolf’s story about his acquaintance, that also happened to a co-worker of mine. He actually met the woman and started a relationship with her, but she played him the whole way. She told him she wanted to live in Texas; they flew out there and he bought her a house. (I forget the reason it had to be in her name.) He came back to Baltimore and retired from the college where we worked. When he said goodbye to everybody and went back to Texas, he found her whole family living in the house, with no room for him. The woman said it just wasn’t going to work out between them, too bad. He came home, tail between his legs, and told our dean he’d be ready to teach the fall semester. She looked at him and said, no, you’ve gone through official retirement and we’ve hired your replacement already. The guy pretty much lost everything.
Jeff, after our 40th High School Reunion, one of the girls I walked to school with in the Sixties connected with her old High School boyfriend who attended the Reunion but lived in Tennessee. Apparently sparks flew after the Reunion and my friend quit her job in Buffalo and moved to Tennessee to be with her old boyfriend. She bought him a luxury RV (somewhere in the $250,000 range) and the plan was they would travel America together. Then, one morning, he was gone, the RV was gone (later she learned he had sold it), and she returned to Buffalo to get her old job back. She’s very depressed.
george that’s really sad, because it’s someone she knew
Maggie, there’s an old saying, “Never try to rekindle an Old Flame.” Her boyfriend from High School was a rat and the 40 years since Graduation didn’t change him. She just was too blind to see his faults…until it was too late!
One that did work out (for some of the participants): when my parents first moved to Arizona their next door neighbors were about to celebrate their 50th Anniversary. Shortly before that, he flew to Cleveland (I think it was) for a high school reunion, where he “clicked” with his former girlfriend and decided to start a new life with her, leaving his wife alone just before her 50th Anniversary, unable to pay the mortgage.
Jeff, a lot of crazy stuff happens at High School Reunions!
Jeff’s words, “Our landline is mostly used to not answer scam calls,” apply here too. I can’t remember the last time I used it to make a phone call!
On the subject of scam calls, one afternoon many years ago (long enough ago that I was still in the habit of answering calls where I didn’t recognize the number), I received two phone calls in rapid succession, both claiming to be from Microsoft, both from people with Indian accents. The first caller was a male who identified himself as “Kenny Rogers,” the second was a female who identified herself as “Dolly Parton.” I hung up on both calls and shared a laugh with John. Later in the day, the phone rang and John answered it. I heard him say, “Whoever is writing your scripts needs to change the placeholder names,” and hung up. Then he turned to me and said, “That was Whitney Houston calling from Microsoft.”
You should have told him you know when to fold ’em before hanging up.
When Jackie calls Verizon these days, she tends to get women with very heavy duty Spanish accents. When you call for computer help, you get “Bob” (real name: Punjab), clearly from India.
In the early 1990s, the company where I was working announced that some of our in-house customer service functions were being outsourced to a company in India. I was so naive at the time, I said, “Wow, for a big announcement like this, you’d think they would have proofread their email more closely: they wrote ‘India’ instead of ‘Indiana’!” It never occurred to me that they could actually mean India!
Deb, we get calls from Apple, Microsoft, AMAZON, “Social Security,” “Medicare,” as well as every charity on the planet.
O, the humanity! Is that really the color of your phone, George? Because it is pretty much the color of the tuxedos we had to wear at my sister in law’s wedding ca. 1978.
We got rid of our landline years ago, but kept the last phone we had. Then a year or so ago, Verizon offered Jackie a “triple play” (or whatever they call it) deal, bundling the phone with the internet and (Fios) television. We ALWAYS kept the ringer turned off. Jackie prefers using the bigger handset to the cellphone, especially when holding on for calls to companies. (Not Amazon – they always call you back immediately when asked to.) We NEVER use the phone otherwise, and in our latest downsizing last month, the latest deal did not require us to keep the landline to get the cheaper price, so we dropped it along with Showtime and a few other channels we rarely if ever watch (like FX0. We ended up saving $35 a month, and we are still ahead of the game even after adding MHz Choice and PBS Playhouse.
Jeff, that is a horrible story about your co-worker.
Oops, PBS Passport.
Jeff, we have some colorful phones here in the Kelley Hotel. SPECTRUM constantly tries to get us to “bundle” our Internet and Cable services with their “internet phone” option. We have resisted. But, if Verizon changes our landline to an internet phone, we’re dropping it.
I never had a landline myself, but I remember my grandparents talking about them, and I guess when they were kids that’s all you could get.
Dan, the costs of maintaining a wire phone system has to been prohibitively expensive (especially with people dropping them). I’m guessing at some point, the traditional landline phones will be defunct.
I was recently told mine is not really a landline phone because it is part of my Comcast package. I am not sure what that means in an emergency. It may look like a landline but it isn’t. I would pay someone to come out here and help me cut my cords because I am paying Comcast a fortune. When I call them the alternative is to buy yet another device FLEX.
Patti, I think the traditional landline is going the way of the dinosaur. All those telephone poles and wires cost money to maintain while at the same time people are abandoning the service and just going with cell phones. Maybe you can work out a deal like the Meyerson did and save some money.
We’ve had no landline for years and I recently got rid of my cell phone (Kitty kept hers). We just don’t answer calls on Kitty’s phone from unknown numbers: if they want to talk, they can leave a detailed message. [Off point: Why do people seldom leave the date and time they called when they leave a message? Irritating.]
And don’t get me started on Verizon! As far as I am concerned they are lower that the pus on a pimple on the pens of a protozoa in Patagonia.
I’m a cranky guy and proud of it. And get off my lawn!
Jerry, I’m not too fond of Verizon right now with their “Area Outage” stealing my landline phone service. I don’t have a cell phone either. Diane has her iPhone and we pretty much follow your protocol for “unknown numbers.” Right now, my lawn is a bog from the rain and melting snow!
Jerry, Jackie gets calls (which she never answers) from all over the country (supposedly). I tend to get calls from this area. Mine occasionally do leave voicemails – 13 seconds in Chinese! I wish I knew what they were saying. Otherwise, it is usually about car insurance or something like that.
Jeff, the charities Diane donates to must sell her name because all the “begging” phone calls we get ask for her. I am much more targeted in my giving.
**penis**
We have a land line, and we use it often. It’s the number most of our business contacts have. We only answer it if it’s a known person or responding to a message left. Barbara has her iPhone, and uses it a lot. I just reset the time on our landline phones this morning. Don’t like DST.
Rick, Bill Crider hated DST!
Yes, I remember. So do I.
But surely you don’t have that corded phone?
Rick, yup.
I have a landline, the same one my family got in 1953 when we purchased this house. One reason to keep it is that they say it will still work in a power outage.
But a couple of years ago, cox somehow put it with my modem, so I’m guessing though it’s a landline still, it’s connected to the internet. You have to replace the battery every couple of years. This is the number I give out, rarely my cell number as I rarely have my cell on and can’t get to it in time to answer calls.
I supposedly have nomorobo on the phone, and I have blocked unidentified callers. That doesn’t really work as a couple of times a month, I’ll try to call back a number that hung up without leaving a message, and it’s always a number that is not in service. There’s a meme going around the gist of it is “I’m so happy to get calls everyday from someone who is concerned about my car warranty”
The old saying if something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t
Maggie, I totally believe that if it’s too good to be true…it isn’t!
We have one only because my wife wants it and pays for it. She also pays for a service that precedes all incoming calls with a message that we don’t accept solicitations and for the caller to hang up if they’re selling something. It has cut the incidences of spam calls to the nub. We also use the land line for all business dealings (doctors, insurance, etc) so they won’t call our cells. If it were up to me I’d cancel it.
Bob, I’d estimate 80% of our friends and family have cancelled their landlines. With this latest outage, I’m considering it.
I have a landline that is included in the total monthly “deal” from Bell MTS for my Internet, TV, cell and long distance calls. No idea if there would be much of a saving if I dropped the landline and got the others with individual prices. I have had the same number forever and that’s the one friends know and I use for people to reach me re my freelance sports column. I hardly ever use my cell and only a few people know that number, which at times I don’t remember. So I guess I am stuck with a landline. I do use my cell to check book prices on ABE when I am book scouting. Truthfully I am not a big phone user and probably get ten calls for every one I make outside my family.
Kent, same here. I rarely use the landline. My wife uses her iPhone to handle most of the phone calls that need to be made.
We still have a landline.
That’s the only way that people are sure of getting a hold of us.
And it’s not going away any time soon.
Beth, I’m sure the Government has incentives to preserve the old fashioned phone lines and telephone poles. But change is on the horizon…