You know you are getting old when:

I use the phone for two things -- to talk to the kids when they need to talk to me, and to talk to my mother. (I went nearly two years without a line capable of calling out-of-state, because I'd forgotten I needed one.) I've got an old answering machine hooked up to the extension on my desk, and that suffices for call screening -- that and an unlisted number take care of most of the problem callers. When I get canvassing calls I generally am able to avoid them -- I know the time of day the kids might call, or my mother, and I usually don't bother to answer outside those times of day. If they don't want to leave a message, it isn't important enough for me to bother with it. If I do get stuck with a canvassing call, I just hang up without saying anything. It takes maybe seven, eight seconds to deal with it.

The most liberating thing in the world is not feeling like you have to respond to every call, every message you receive, or feeling like you have to be constantly "available." I see how that affects other people, who can't leave their phones in their pockets for more than a few minutes, and who look like they're going to break into a cold sweat if they're forced to do so, and I don't want any part of that kind of life.

I avoid on general principle using phone services that require navigating a touch tone menu -- if they're impossible to avoid, I use the phone at work, which doesn't happen very often. (And yes, I'm well aware of the irony that I'm the voice of our touch-tone menu at work. Life is like that.) For bills, I send checks. I'll probably be the last person in the world doing this, but I find that any sort of extra service promising "convenience" is generally for the profit of the creditor, not the creditee. I haven't needed it till now, so why start?

About six years ago, we had a gigantic ice storm blow thru here that knocked out power to my entire side of town for nearly a week. Nobody on my street had a working phone. Nobody, that is, but me. I later installed an extension out on the front porch and let the neighbors know they can help themselves if they need it. POTS forever, that's me.

I’d guess that I let at least half the calls to my iPhone go unanswered. If I don’t recognize the number, chances are it’s from a solicitor or a political campaign or a polling company or ...

And if it’s from someone I wish to speak with, well, I trust that person will leave a message.

I'm still a few years away from retirement at my present profession if I make it that long. I'm not entirely sure what I will do with my time after that and it doesn't really matter to me what it turns out to be. The one thing I look forward to on that day is throwing my supplied cell phone on the desk and never being obligated to answer another call, especially in the middle of the night.

Much as I might dread getting that middle-of-the-night call informing of some awful event, I’d rather know than not know.

The dewy-eyed bride has her phone set not to notify her of anything between 2200 and 0600 hours. She figures whatever the matter might be, it can wait ’til morning. If a relative is on his or her deathbed and the end is imminent, well, we couldn’t get there in time anyway. Not since the Gulfstream got repo’ed.

I got a middle of the night call once telling me that my radio-show partner of the moment had dropped dead in a bar -- and I had to go on the air that morning to deliver the news of his passing. Probably the worst midnight call I've ever gotten, compounded by the fact that a sizable number of listeners assumed it was a particularly tasteless gag.

These days when the phone rings in the middle of the night it's usually the security company telling me someone's triggered the burglar alarm at work, and I have to go down and walk thru the place with the police to be sure nobody's lurking inside. For a while I'd make an effort to get dressed for these adventures, but the older I get and the less damns I give, I now just go down there in a flannel nightgown and a mangy bathrobe. If I have to get out of bed in the middle of the night I might as well look the part.

I finally broke down and got a cell phone four years ago when I moved. Once I got here, I got nothing but solicitations on my land line, so I had it disconnected. But the old wooden rotary phone is still mounted on the wall. I could receive calls, but could no longer make them with the land line service here.

I spend so little time on my phone--a $5 flip phone--that the person I've shared an office with for over three years said she doesn't know what my phone sounds like when it rings. People's obsession with texting--I just don't get it.

^^^^^
So I take it you post here on a laptop? Or a desktop?

My iPhone does 90-plus percent of whatever I might otherwise do on the iMac. We also have a pair of Microsoft Surface tablets with detachable keyboards. The missus uses hers quite a bit, much more than I use mine. But for some stuff I find it a useful tool.

Paisley said:

I finally broke down and got a cell phone four years ago when I moved. Once I got here, I got nothing but solicitations on my land line, so I had it disconnected. But the old wooden rotary phone is still mounted on the wall. I could receive calls, but could no longer make them with the land line service here.

I spend so little time on my phone--a $5 flip phone--that the person I've shared an office with for over three years said she doesn't know what my phone sounds like when it rings. People's obsession with texting--I just don't get it.

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One huge upside to retiring was not renewing my cel phone contract. I went from a $100 a month talk/text/data plan down to a $10 a month limited talk only. My wife has a $10 month to month plan as well. Other than a friend or two my wife is the only one that has my number. Most of the time I am not sure where my phone it located and sometimes use the landline to call the phone so I can find it in the house.

Best thing I ever did was go sim-only. About five years ago now, I came to then end of a contract and realised that by only paying for a sim and not a handset as well I could cut my monthly bill from £55 to £15. In the first two years I saved well over £800 - I bought myself a flagship-level handset for £350 in 2015 and I still came out ahead. This last year it came tiem to replace that handset, and I now have something with the same spec thatcost me about £130 - phones now are so advanced that even a basic model can do everything I need of it, no need to pay out for flagships. And I'm still saving in excess of £400 a year.

GHT said:

And there, Edward, is where you have hit the hammer right on the head. In my schooldays I was lucky enough to have the kind of English teacher with that gift of relevance. He would give you sections of homework of whatever your weakest subject was, to be written out half a dozen times, as a form of punishment for any sort of transgression. He did this as an alternative to writing out, "I must not talk in class," 500 times. A number of us actually argued that learning Shakespeare was irrelevant in modern society. A month later, our English class was to attend the Shakespearean play: "Othello." We were allowed to bring our text books into the theatre, but most of us were unexpectedly absorbed by the play. Better still, when the audience had left, we were brought down to the front two rows to meet the cast who had returned to the stage, still in costume, to answer our questions. The cast all sat on the edge of the stage and addressed every question, or confrontation, asked of them. I had the same lifting of the scales as my young neighbour did, I saw how Shakespeare had changed our language, how he had dropped things like verb endings, how we didn't need to conjugate verbs like those who speak of a Latin based language, and so much more. At last I grasped Shakespeare's blank verse, to this day I have such a liking for the work of The Bard and that's all thanks to Mr McCardle, my former English teacher.

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One thing you never forgetg is a good teacher.... ironically, that'sx still very much the case at tertiary level, despite the fact that the management culture of the last twenty years no longer values teachers. (Teaching is very valuable - it's treated as a cash cow - but those who deliver it are not valued.)

We still have, and use, our rotary phone, the one that was installed in our first home in 1968. But we also have a modern phone connected to it. There's two reasons why the modern phone is there. Firstly, it shows on it's screen, the incoming number, which we can then decide whether we want to take the call or not. Secondly, rotary phones cannot be used when you have a choice menu. If you are asked to press one for money, two for the show, dialling it will get you cut off.

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I gather some folks have added a pulser voodoo box that allows you to use a rotary dial with a ditigal menu, butg that is the limit. It's funny, there was a time I answered all phonecalls on a landline in case... Now if a number I don'#t recognise comes up on the mobile at a time I'm not expecting a call, I just don't answer. Most of the time they don't call back. (When it's from another city in England, more often than not it's a call centre cold-call; I'm on all the do notg call registers, but we all get caught out by online T&Cs here and there.)

tonyb said:

I have a working phone hanging on the kitchen wall but it’s not really a landline. It’s part of the “bundle” we pay Comcast waaaay too much for every month. I have the ringer turned off, and I don’t give out the number, so the only calls we receive are calls we have no interest in answering.

I pick it up every now and then to erase the voicemails. Solicitors, robocalls.

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I've never used voicemail on anything - one of the first things I did when I got my mobile was call the company and have the voicemail deactivated. I always figure they can either trext or call back, and I know they tried to call usually anyhow...

My landline is the same. I did without one for the first two years in my flat, but I couldn't survive any longer without home internet. 97% of the calls I make with the landline are becasue I've misplaced my mobile and I'm trying to listen or it ringing... When I move house (hopefully within the next couple of years), I plan to look seriously at having carbon fibre optic voodoo broadband put in. I'm currently on a legacy deal where my broadband and phone are under £20 a month, and I only have the phoneline because it is a necessary channel for the broadband. I actually looked at going completely wireless, no phoneline at all, £20 a month, but the part of London I live in was not covered by that service. If I ever can, I'd rather pay the same total for faster internet than two smaller, separate fees for an internet I need and a phone I don't.

My fondest wish is that eventually someone will make a device that charges my phone in a little drawer at the bottom, while letting me make calls from it via a rotary dial, and looks like a 1940s telephone. One forf the desk and a wallmount one elsewhere in the house...

tonyb said:

It reminds me of a fellow I worked with 25 or so years ago who said he couldn’t foresee any need for him to have a computer. Another coworker and I told him it would soon get to a point that he would have little choice in the matter, that he would be needing Internet access the way he needed a car. You pretty much gotta have one to participate in this economy.

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Back in 1984, my primary school in rural Ireland was already fairly flash in having a School Computer, one of the old BBCBs. My dad was the treasurer of the PTA, and he put a proposal forward that they sould spend money on a second computer, on the basis that (as he saw, working in telecoms - at that point BT were *already* preparing for a future where mobile phones were the norm) the kids were going to grow up in a digital world and this would give us a head start. One man made a very spirited argument that computers were a fad, a toy, and a waste of money that would disappear in a few years' time. Dad prevailed, but I always wondered what happened that other guy - not least as he was a journalist, a profession which has been so utterly revolutionised by computerisation in the last thirty odd years.

As a codicil to this story, two years later I moved up to Grammar school where they had an entire room full of the same computer. When I left that Grammar school seven years later, they had split those computers up among departments that could still use some of the software as they were so out of date they were worth nothing to sell or even donate.

tonyb said:

^^^^^
So I take it you post here on a laptop? Or a desktop?

My iPhone does 90-plus percent of whatever I might otherwise do on the iMac. We also have a pair of Microsoft Surface tablets with detachable keyboards. The missus uses hers quite a bit, much more than I use mine. But for some stuff I find it a useful tool.

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According to the Office of National Statistics, 2013 was the year in which, at least in the UK, the mobile telephone overtook computers to become the most common internet access hardware. Increasingly, my phone is as much a pocket tablet and entertainment device as it is a phone; calls are among there rarer things for which I use it. I do prefer, if I want to listen to music for hours, to use my separate, dedidcated music player, or a 'real' camera for photos, or my 10" tablet for watching Netflix and Prime, BUT in a pinch and with access to a charging point the phone is very capable of doing all those things whenever I just need something quick to hand....

Edward said:

...

Back in 1984, my primary school in rural Ireland was already fairly flash in having a School Computer, one of the old BBCBs. My dad was the treasurer of the PTA, and he put a proposal forward that they sould spend money on a second computer, on the basis that (as he saw, working in telecoms - at that point BT were *already* preparing for a future where mobile phones were the norm) the kids were going to grow up in a digital world and this would give us a head start. One man made a very spirited argument that computers were a fad, a toy, and a waste of money that would disappear in a few years' time. Dad prevailed, but I always wondered what happened that other guy - not least as he was a journalist, a profession which has been so utterly revolutionised by computerisation in the last thirty odd years.

As a codicil to this story, two years later I moved up to Grammar school where they had an entire room full of the same computer. When I left that Grammar school seven years later, they had split those computers up among departments that could still use some of the software as they were so out of date they were worth nothing to sell or even donate.



According to the Office of National Statistics, 2013 was the year in which, at least in the UK, the mobile telephone overtook computers to become the most common internet access hardware. Increasingly, my phone is as much a pocket tablet and entertainment device as it is a phone; calls are among there rarer things for which I use it. I do prefer, if I want to listen to music for hours, to use my separate, dedidcated music player, or a 'real' camera for photos, or my 10" tablet for watching Netflix and Prime, BUT in a pinch and with access to a charging point the phone is very capable of doing all those things whenever I just need something quick to hand....

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Yup, you get aboard that train or you get run over by it.

Still, though, I maintain that as a learning tool, especially in the early grades, pencil and paper is a superior technology.

I would rather avoid getting all MacLuhan-y on yer asses, but I do believe he was on to something in that we humans engage with different media in different ways. Glowing screens are fine for reading shorter, simpler stuff. But for weightier matters it’s hard to beat print on paper. I don’t discount the role age and experience plays in this, but I don’t think it’s entirely that, either.

Ready access to information is a wonderful thing, as far as it goes. It certainly makes for quicker resolutions to barroom debates (no, Joe, Slick Watts was not on the Seattle NBA squad during their championship season). But information is not all there is to knowledge and understanding. Indeed, a superficial knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

I find that reading on screen requires a very different set of skills than reading on paper. When reading on paper I see the whole page, and I process the information in that context -- the layout of the page often has as much to say to me in conveying the significance of the information as the words themselves. Plus the fact that I read very fast means I often process entire pages rather than single paragraphs at once. On screen, because I have to enlarge the image so much because of my poor vision, I don't see the full page, and I find it much more difficult to interpret what I'm reading. I find screen reading like trying to read thru a blindfold, and I avoid it if at all possible.

Reading news online is a particular problem this way. When I read a newspaper the first thing I do is look over the layout, the play of the story, the arrangement of the headlines. That alone tells me a great deal about the relative significance of what I'm reading, or at least how the editors of the paper want me to view that signficiance -- and understand that informs my interpretation of what I read when I get to the individual articles. It's like scanning a map to get the lay of the land before venturing out into that land.

I can't do this with internet material. On the internet, every article you click on is equal to every other in terms of its layout and its emphasis, and that, again, gives the effect of reading with only one eye open. Even looking at scans of newspapers on line is difficult, because, again, the size of the image I'm forced to use because of my vision makes it impossible for me to see the whole page at a glance.

I suppose a generation of people who learn to read on screens won't have this issue because their brains will be wired differently. But I'm not that generation, and I can't force myself to be. It's a question of hard wiring.

tonyb said:

I would rather avoid getting all MacLuhan-y on yer asses, but I do believe he was on to something in that we humans engage with different media in different ways. Glowing screens are fine for reading shorter, simpler stuff. But for weightier matters it’s hard to beat print on paper. I don’t discount the role age and experience plays in this, but I don’t think it’s entirely that, either.

Ready access to information is a wonderful thing, as far as it goes. It certainly makes for quicker resolutions to barroom debates (no, Joe, Slick Watts was not on the Seattle NBA squad during their championship season). But information is not all there is to knowledge and understanding. Indeed, a superficial knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

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Certainly true. My eyesight would be a lot better than it is had I not needed to work on a screen 35 plus hours a week.

LizzieMaine said:

I find that reading on screen requires a very different set of skills than reading on paper. When reading on paper I see the whole page, and I process the information in that context -- the layout of the page often has as much to say to me in conveying the significance of the information as the words themselves. Plus the fact that I read very fast means I often process entire pages rather than single paragraphs at once. On screen, because I have to enlarge the image so much because of my poor vision, I don't see the full page, and I find it much more difficult to interpret what I'm reading. I find screen reading like trying to read thru a blindfold, and I avoid it if at all possible.

Reading news online is a particular problem this way. When I read a newspaper the first thing I do is look over the layout, the play of the story, the arrangement of the headlines. That alone tells me a great deal about the relative significance of what I'm reading, or at least how the editors of the paper want me to view that signficiance -- and understand that informs my interpretation of what I read when I get to the individual articles. It's like scanning a map to get the lay of the land before venturing out into that land.

I can't do this with internet material. On the internet, every article you click on is equal to every other in terms of its layout and its emphasis, and that, again, gives the effect of reading with only one eye open. Even looking at scans of newspapers on line is difficult, because, again, the size of the image I'm forced to use because of my vision makes it impossible for me to see the whole page at a glance.

I suppose a generation of people who learn to read on screens won't have this issue because their brains will be wired differently. But I'm not that generation, and I can't force myself to be. It's a question of hard wiring.

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Quite so. It took me a long time to learn aspecifci skill not only of composing but also editing on screen. Even now I do much better at editing from a print of a pdf than working on it purely electronically. So much easier to flick back and forth too.

Edward said:

...
Quite so. It took me a long time to learn aspecifci skill not only of composing but also editing on screen. Even now I do much better at editing from a print of a pdf than working on it purely electronically. So much easier to flick back and forth too.

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My habit, back when I hacked for a living, was to run off hard copies and scribble changes with pen on paper over lunch.

When I was a proofreader for hire I insisted on working off completed, laid-out pages, the full tabloid sheets. I just saw more that way. And because I worked cheap I figured I could get pushy about it.

And I misspelled “McLuhan.”

Even the editor needs an editor.

tonyb said:

^^^^^
So I take it you post here on a laptop? Or a desktop?

My iPhone does 90-plus percent of whatever I might otherwise do on the iMac. We also have a pair of Microsoft Surface tablets with detachable keyboards. The missus uses hers quite a bit, much more than I use mine. But for some stuff I find it a useful tool.

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I do everything on a laptop or desktop. I can't imagine trying to work on a screen the size of my hand or type with my thumbs.

That includes finding my way around. I've never used GPS. I have a road atlas and book of city streets in my car and a pretty good mental map of the city. I do like Google street view, though. And their satellite image of my house came in handy when I wanted a new driveway but didn't have a survey of my house.

Trenchfriend said:

When you have no clue, which generation of the Playstation is actually on the market.

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. . . when you have no clue what a "Playstation" is. . . .

Went in to see the doctor last week, and the twenty- something tech and I were chatting as she took my temp and bp. I mentioned these Calvin & Hobbes strips, where Calvin goes to see his pediatrician. She had never heard of Calvin & Hobbes, the poor kid.

One of Dr. Seuss’s finer if lesser-known works is titled “You’re Only Old Once! A Book for Obsolete Children.”

I recall its appearance at a regular Tuesday night dinner gathering shortly after the book’s release, back in 1980-something. It had me in stitches.

ChiTownScion said:

Went in to see the doctor last week, and the twenty- something tech and I were chatting as she took my temp and bp. I mentioned these Calvin & Hobbes strips, where Calvin goes to see his pediatrician. She had never heard of Calvin & Hobbes, the poor kid.

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Calvin & Hobbes appeared in many a European publication too. The little loner with a vivid imagination. I wonder what he would have become in adult life?
What's the betting that your doctor didn't use, or even know of, the slide rule and logarithm tables when she studied mathematics?

Paisley said:

That includes finding my way around. I've never used GPS. I have a road atlas and book of city streets in my car and a pretty good mental map of the city. I do like Google street view, though. And their satellite image of my house came in handy when I wanted a new driveway but didn't have a survey of my house.

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Good to hear! I was a boy scout and think in terms of North, South, East, West and taught my wife to find her way around with using directional landmarks. I am proud to say he is a very competent navigator!