'The death of the telephone call'

We have no landline. When we had the house built about nine years ago, we just didn't have service connected. We figured we didn't need it.

On the downside, we have never been able to use On Demand with our DirecTV, which requires a phone connection.

All of Internet access at home - devices and computers - is dependent on our cell/hotspot. In the first few years, this resulted in some very spotty service, and for the past several years we are constantly battling our data limit.

 

We use our wifi

 

And where's the wifi coming from?

 

Fiberoptics. Sorry, sounds like you don't have that.

 

Buck's Place

 

My second office has an old school landline. This is what type of phone I have on my desk.

 

Oooooh ... so do I. And if someone leaves me a voice mail, it takes seven (really) steps to hear the friggin' thing.

 

I still do some general journalism and some of my stories have a week or so lead-time. I've been wondering what would happen if, instead of calling or e-mailing people I want to talk to, I wrote them a letter.

Not because I didn't have their number but just for the sheer experiment of it. Plus, as even more passive-aggressive as it would be, you can't send telegrams anymore.

 

I write letters all the time (surprise, surprise).

The fun part: even though they go out to friends and family, who know me and my dinosaur ways, people are flummoxed about responding.

Email, phone calls are great, but one former colleague swore she would reply in kind, with a handwritten note (I had mailed her a quick note with a current copy of our shop's paper, so she could have a good laugh). She had to use stationary from her aunt and "borrow" an envelope from work, because she didn't have a blank envelope in her home.

"The few things I mail anymore come with reply envelopes enclosed," she told ... er, wrote me.

 

That's a line coming in from your phone company. That's what we didn't have done when we built the house.
My house is in the foot hills of a mountain range, but there's phone service. We've could've gotten a phone line, but when we were building the house we mistakenly thought we wouldn't need it.

We had satellite, cell phones, and the volume of streamable video of interest just wasn't that high nine years ago.
The cell phone/hotspot was enough for running our Internet needs.
Over time, the amount of data we use has grown, even though the number of data users has stayed the same.