For most of my life, no matter what happened, I could always depend on my land line phone to work. Even when our house lost electricity
Now everything is digital. I don’t even think I can pay for a copper wire phone line. Every couple of months, my internet goes out and takes the phone with it. Happened again this morning. And every time the electricity goes out, the phone modem goes down with it, and I lose phone connection as well.
No, I don’t have a cell phone, so there is no way to make phone calls.
Seems like we have gone backwards in phone service. I would not call digital phones progress by any means.
One good thing about the landline phones - not a single pedestrian or motor vehicle has been hit by a car because the driver was too focused on returning the urgent text message they just received while driving.
We’ve gone from smoke signals to letters to telegraph to a telephone…where you could speak to another person and hear their voice across the world. But we have returned to “written” communication since phones are used more for text than they are for voice. And to be honest, most “smartphones” suck as telephones.
smart phones save you money. they have apps for place like chick-fil-a where you earn points and get free food. You can tickets to ballgames and shows on your phone and scan it to get in. They have great nav systems like Waze I can go on
It’s not just the ability to talk to someone, cell phones do so much more. Also maintaining copper POTS is very expensive, you can buy a cell phone for under $100 and get a plan with unlimited talk and texting plus some Internet data for $20 a month.
When one downside is death, then I think that outweighs any upside.We had a woman who was pulling weeds in her front yard killed by a driver that was texting and went off the neighborhood street and into her yard.
or adjusting the radio. Lets ban radios also. Oops I dropped my food and reached to get it. Lets ban food in the car. Oh no they were drunk. Let’s ban alcohol. opps the kids were fighting in the back seat and you turned around to yell at them. Lets ban kids .
@brobbs… Is your beef a legitimate criticism? Or is it a knee-jerk reaction coming from a right-winger who’s looking for an excuse to spout off against someone they consider too liberal?
Who said cyclists? I said a woman pulling fucking weeds was killed. Pedestrians have been killed. Other drivers have been killed because of some asshole on a smartphone. True…many of teh accidents that they caused were phoned in by good Samaritans, but the phone was the reason all of this shit happens.
Where did I say ban anything? I said that a big downside of cell phones is that people are killed or injured by people responding to the urgent text of “How R U?” But I would submit that far more accidents are caused by people using a smartphone than by someone changing a radio station.
We rely on a landline because the cell service at our house is, at best, spotty. We have cell phones, and they sometimes work at one end of the house, but that’s it.
I got my first cell phone during the eighties when they were huge and very expensive to buy so I only used it for emergencies. My husband didn’t like cell phones and would not get one for himself until he was in his seventies. Even then he only used it for emergencies and I was the only one that had his cell phone number
