Born in the 60s, old enough to be your parent: no landline at our house in I don’t know how many years. We both have a phone that’s nearby all of the time, what would we do with a landline except as a spam vector? And my parents, who are old enough to be your grandparents? Ditched the landline a couple of years ago. I have no idea what the demographics look like for hardlines anymore.
It's necessary if your house has poor cellular reception.
If you already have Internet access, you could also get a femtocell.
I'd love it if my cell phone auto-screened calls from numbers not in my address book. Give them a special message that explains the only way they'll get through is to leave a message. Or that they can register their number in a public registry that fully explains who they are and then I can decide whether to take calls from that number.
Google Voice sort of has this feature. There's a feature to prompt unknown callers for their name which will then show up on your caller ID.
Besides his emotional issues there author touches on a few great points. 1. Why do we use a loose, unstructured medium like voice for customer support and the script and restrict almost everything about it? Maybe basic support would be better in a different medium and only escalations go to phone? 2. Social engineering is still one of the most effective ways of hacking and the phone is a great medium for that. Yet we…
Because it is the most simplest and the most spread one? You don't need to sign up for yet-another-communication-service; you are not dependent on corporations like Facebook to conduct your business; you don't need to install an app. What else would you use?
I’m probably a bit the other way in that I get frustrated with text messages going back and forth and back and forth when a one minute phone call will sort everything out far more efficiently. Probably also has something to do with hating tapping away at tiny virtual keyboard on the phone, too. My teenage daughter seems very reluctant to make a phone call. Watching her try and organise something with her friends driv…
I'm always glad when someone calls and I always call people instead of typing down thoughts. Even better than calling is meeting someone IRL, but of course that's not always feasible. Then I usually begin by telling him or her how grateful I am that somebody is choosing the direct way over some form of texting and there are, sadly, far too many. Like your dad, I wouldn't buy anything not specially designed for transmitting voice in an analogue fashion. Too few options there, recently... Most of the people I communicate with are aware of this, thank goodness, but it's always hard to tell new acquaintances that I don't use Viber, Whatsapp, Facebook and even reluctant to use SMS.
My changed relationship with the telephone became weirdly apparent when I watched the original WarGames movie recently. There's a scene where David (Matthew Broderick) is alone with McKittrick (Dabney Coleman) in his office being interrogated separated by an office desk. While they're sitting there the telephone on McKittrick's desk starts ringing, which he silently ignores keeping his eyes glued on David, who grows…
I came into existence quite a bit after that film did, but I just watched it for the first time two weeks ago and the phone going unanswered definitely made me quite uncomfortable. Excellent film.
I ran a business for several years that never quite grew large enough to support additional technical staff, so I was always on call. It didn't happen often, but I got enough calls (or pages, since that was how I dealt with it in early couple of years) in the middle of the night to where I literally had nightmares about a phone ringing for a while. Even today sometimes my stomach hurts and I feel angry when the phone…
I have an after-hours pager about once a year or so, and each time I get the same sense of low-grade trepidation at night. Sleep quality also suffers tremendously, I'm always wide awake at the lightest disturbance. It's terrible, and I always feel for anyone who has to be on call at night with regularity.
> I hate telephones. > The problem is the medium. The problem is synchronous communication. The problem is the telephone. I hate telephones. > I’m told that, in 1993, 2.5 million people in the UK had “telephone phobia”. That’s over 4%, similar to rates of arachnophobia. This is not unusual, and I’d bet rates are higher now. Everyone hates telephones. > ... Asynchronous textual communication is how everyone communicat…
Lots of companies have live chat already, often there are certain things they won’t let you do on live chat because of the perception that it is less secure.
Big companies seem even less like likely to have an email address where you can get service.
The companies can keep their phone line. It’s just better for customers and likely cheaper for them to provide other options.
Caller: Sir, I can not give you any information until you identify yourself.
Me: Hahah. /click
Don't call me and make demands. Seriously. If you aren't willing to tell me why you just called this number, I'm not even going to verify I'm a person let alone identify myself.