Rural Routes, Blog Version

K and I attended an antiques and collectibles sale on the weekend, at which we saw several vintage telephones – mostly black, all with rotary dials.
For some reason, I have been thinking about telephones ever since.
Until 1975, the community in which I was raised had party telephone lines. Our telephone was a brown wooden box on the wall with a handle that you cranked to get the operator. Our number was 312 ring 31. Three long rings and one short.
Our grandmother’s telephone was an older larger model (but still brown and wooden) and her number was 312 ring 5. Five long rings. Since we were on the same line, we called her by turning the crank five times.
My grandmother lived with her eldest son, my dad’s oldest brother, a bachelor who died in 1972. So that Amma would not be alone at night, the older of my two brothers started sleeping in one of her upstairs bedrooms.
Every morning we would call over to Amma’s house to make sure that our brother would be up in time to catch the school bus. Amma was hard-of-hearing and it would take a while for our brother to hear the phone and make the trip down the stairs to the kitchen, so sometimes that phone rang many times. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five.
Our neighbours on the same line also got to hear the phone ring over and over again. It became a community conversation piece: how many rings did it take to get him up this morning?
Not only could people on our line hear our phone ringing; they could also listen in if they wanted, although that was strictly against etiquette. Which isn’t to say that we didn’t sometimes do it.
If your conversation went on too long, the operator was apt to come on line to tell you that you had been on long enough and other people wanted to use the line.
All that came to an end when we moved to dial telephones in 1975. The brown wood box was replaced by a black wall phone with a rotary dial. The local telephone office no longer required operators.
Eventually rotary dials were replaced by touchtone phones. The advent of call display meant that we no longer answered with a question. Hello? Now we knew who was calling us.
Call display would have meant no difference to my father-in-law, who refused to answer the phone as a matter of principle. If he needed to talk to someone, he would rather get in the car and drive to their house than dial their number.
When fax machines came along, we thought they were a wonderful invention. They are almost obsolete now. Then there were portable rechargeable phones. We could take them with us from room to room and perhaps avoid that dash up the basement stairs when the phone rang at an inconvenient time.
But of course, the ultimate in portable phones is the cell phone. Our first cell phones were flip phones and they were no smarter than we were.
Eventually they were replaced by Apple phones and Blackberries and an assortment of androids. Texting became a thing. And ‘apps’.
We kept our landline at the farm home because cell service was unreliable. Although both of us have cell phones, we tended to forget about them once inside the four walls of our home.
One time our power went out. Luckily the landline worked with or without power, so I called Manitoba Hydro to report the outage. Unfortunately, all I got was a voice message telling me that, if I were calling to report an outage, I needed to go online to do so.
But our internet did not work without power.
Whenever I hear someone say something like “There is this thing called the Internet, you know”, I am tempted to say ,”Yes, but…..”
When our landline phone began to have problems, I went to the MTS store to replace it. They had none.
“Go to Canadian Tire,” I was told. So that is what I did.
When MTS became Bell MTS, K and I suddenly found ourselves with two cell providers. Because both the landline and his cell were in his name, K got to stay with Bell MTS. Because my cell was in my name and it was the only phone in my name, I was shifted over to Telus.
Now if we call each other on our cells, we have to pay a surcharge for phoning between providers. I find that maddening since moving to another provider was not my choice.
Now we live in the city where cell service is excellent. We still, however, have a land line. We’re bucking the trend because many people are giving theirs up. Our children do not have one. We are showing our age perhaps.
Recently K attempted to get a better deal on his monthly cell phone charges. The kiosk employee made some changes. Suddenly people trying to phone him were getting a ‘no longer in service’ message. No wonder his phone had become so unusually silent.
He went back to the kiosk. Reversing the changes proved to be a complicated procedure and the employee contacted a supervisor for assistance.
“Just sell him a smart phone,” the supervisor said.
“But he doesn’t want a smart phone. He doesn’t need one,” the employee said.
In the end, he got to keep his flip phone and it is again taking calls.
Many years ago I wrote a story about my Amma (she of the 312 ring 5 phone number), who was born in the early 1890s and died just a few weeks short of her 98th birthday. Amma’s life began before the days of power, air flight and telephones and ended in the days of computers and rocket science, I said in the story.
Now, thinking specifically about telephones, it feels to me that the pace of change has quickened in our lives. But that, too, may just be my age showing.