The home phone is relatively cheap, incredibly reliable, and - if you buy the right phone - will work for years without replacement. Oh, and far as I can tell, a home phone won't give you brain cancer. In a perfect world, the hard line should have become a platform for building out an entire app ecosystem for the home. And yet... it didn't.
Canceling my landline phone account, cutting off service to my home for good, and rendering the telephones that had long sat on tables in every room as useless as my closeted bread machine, I took the final step in a lifelong attempt to free myself from the wires that tethered me.
Before the cell phone and the Internet, you felt a more pure sense of liberty than we do today. Whenever you left the house, and the phone, in your kitchen attached to the wall, nobody was able to get a hold of you.
Back in 2000, I didn't have a mobile phone.
Our dream was that someday nobody would talk on a wired telephone. Everybody would talk on a wireless phone.
I have a home phone number, and I like it! It's like a throwback already.
I can at least hearken to a time when I didn't have a cell phone, where I had to call my mom after movies collect from a pay phone, and when they said, 'State your name,' I'd say, 'Mom, pick me up,' and hang up the phone.
I don't have a telephone. If I had a lot of money, I wouldn't have one.
Recently, I have come to assume that any call to my landline is from a telemarketer or an automated call from Terminex, letting me know that our regularly scheduled pest-extermination service will occur on its regular schedule. So I usually ignore my home phone.
I try to use the landline whenever I can. We cannot do without the mobile phones, but we don't need to use them indiscriminately. We are overusing it; we are misusing it.
For the next generation, focused on the future, the E.U. is as weird and old-fashioned as having a landline.
