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What we miss and don’t miss about our dial-up phones

By Ed Goldman

In ancient times—you know, before the invention of cellphones—you could accrue long-distance charges on your bill by calling someone just an hour away.

As a result, when I’d go out of town as a young adult—and my parents wanted to be assured of my having reached my destination but also didn’t want me or them to pay extra to make a call that might last all of 10 seconds—we engaged in a scam that, looking back, might have caused the initial breakup of the country’s telephone monopolies.

I’d arrive at my destination and, with the operator, place a collect call to someone named, say, Graham Cracker. I’d give the operator my folks’ phone number. The operator would dial it and when my Mom or Dad would pick up, the conversation would go like this:

Operator: I have a collect call for you from a Mister Graham Cracker. Will you accept the charges?

Mom or Dad: Absolutely not!

The operator would then give me the bad news and hang up. No one would be charged for the call and my parents knew that by my making the call, I’d arrived safely.

This almost backfired once when I really did use the name Graham Cracker and my Mom had to fight back a laugh. After that she told me to “Stop thinking you always have to be so clevuh,” making “clevuh” sound as evil as an adjective for Satan had he been born into a Jewish apartment house New York’s City’s Parkchester.

Recently, I ran up quite a cellphone tab with AT$T (oops: Make that AT&T), calling or texting my OSSO (oh-so-significant other). She was in Europe—in a country where, unlike the United States, they speak English. 

It didn’t occur to me at first that there are roaming charges and there are also ROAMING CHARGES, and that I’d fallen prey to the latter. In hindsight, maybe I should have called her each night and asked for Graham Cracker—but these days, I think placing any kind of operator-assisted call, if you can even find one, now requires you to first have a letter of credit on file with the phone company.

When I moved into my current digs four-and-a-half years ago, I couldn’t find the outlet for a landline. Then, after spending the better part of a morning connecting with AT&T to request one—an adventure I wrote about in a two-part column for the Sacramento Business Journal on March 16 and 17, 2017 —I began to wonder, as many of you also have, Why do I even need a landline?

Well, there’s the nostalgia factor.

I still miss dialing, for example—hearing the swish-doodle-doodle/swish-doodle-doodle of the little carousel spinning around on a quest to reach my party. But it’s hard to explain why anyone would miss an era when we didn’t think someone could hear us at the other end of a long-distance call and, accordingly, we yelled, making a Friday call to the folks kick-start a weekend of laryngitis. 

So I went strictly cellular. I put my old landline phone in the garage with the intention of turning it into a sculpture someday. It’s still an intention—of which necessity is not the mother, though “intention” does rhyme beautifully with “invention.”