Old technology
08/12/23 01:03
It took almost the entire afternoon yesterday - over 4 hours - for us to obtain new cell phones, migrate our data, and retire our old cell phones. At the same time, we switched providers though we kept the same phone numbers. I don’t know if the switch in providers was a factor in the process taking so much time or not. It was a factor in the fact that we had already spent a significant amount of time the day before without accomplishing the same process. Our intended timeframe was interrupted by a special promotion from the new company that didn’t go into effect until yesterday. It is a long story and not all of the details are of interest to others, but the process provides some points of illustration about our culture.
Before I go any further, however, I want to tell the story of a blue princess telephone with a rotary dial. Back in 1978, we moved into a parsonage in southwest North Dakota. It was our first experience of living in a house as a married couple. We had lived in a series of apartments prior to that move. In some of those apartments we had had our own telephone. In some we had shared a phone with others. In those days telephones were connected to the wall by a wire. We didn’t have portable phones. We didn’t talk on the phone in our car. When we worked at a church camp during the summers, we didn’t have a telephone. There was no phone service at the remote mountain location of our camp. Back to 1978, however. We went a bit “wild” with our new home. We had the phone company install a desk phone in the study of our new home. A wall phone was installed in the kitchen. And we asked for and got a third phone - a real luxury - a phone in our bedroom. This third phone was special because you could turn off the ringer so it was silent. That way, when a phone call came in the middle of the night, we could answer without getting out of bed, but we didn’t have the jarring of hearing the phone right next to our heads. We’d hear the phone in another part of the house, but be able to answer from bed.
Another fun detail is that the phone in our kitchen had a 25 foot cord between the wall unit and the handset. With that phone we could walk into the study, the garage, and the dining room as well as be in the kitchen. It was a real luxury compared to the usual 6 food cords that meant that you had to remain in the same place as you talked on the phone. Of course we didn’t talk on the phone much in those days. Long distance calls, which were all calls outside of our county, were 11 cents per minute. We didn’t want to rack up big bills.
Relevant to the story is that in those days, no one owned their own phones. Our phones were leased from Bell Telephone Company, also known as American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) before an anti-trust settlement mandated the breakup of that company into several regional carriers. On January 1, 1984, the operations of AT&T were transferred to seven regional holding companies. Part of the breakup of the company was that individuals were allowed to own their their own phones rather than lease them. We purchased the phones in our house at that time. The newest of those phones was that blue princess phone with a rotary dial that could have its bell silenced.
We kept and used that phone until we had our land line turned off in 2020 when we moved from our house in Rapid City, South Dakota. It had served us in three different homes. It sill works and is compatible with wired phone systems in operation today. However, we no longer have a land line. We rely on our cell phones for all of our communications. If we wanted, however, we could pay to have a land line in our home and that 50-year-old technology would work as designed.
Back to yesterday’s events. At one point in the process of transferring our phone service, one of our cell phones experienced some kind of failure. I don’t know what the problem was. I’m suspicious that the person helping us in the phone store simply kept pushing buttons and making changes to the phone that overwhelmed it, though it is possible that the phone experienced some other kind of malfunction. The result was that the data transfer could not take place from that phone to the new one. We ended up going home and bringing a computer back to the phone store so that we could migrate data from the backup instead of from the original phone. Susan made the trip to pick up the computer while I waited at the phone store as my phone took over two hours to transfer all of its data.
As she was making the trip, I worried for a while. It felt very vulnerable to be in town away from my spouse with neither of us having access to a working phone. I didn’t have access to a vehicle should she need help. She didn’t have a way to call me or send me any messages. Neither of us could contact either of our children. It was a situation that we routinely experienced in years past. There were no problems. She returned safely. We got our new phones working. Life goes on.
While this was going on the clerk in the store kept saying that part of our problems was that one of the phones we were retiring - the one that failed - was simply “so old” that it could not work with “modern” systems. She strongly urged us not to wait “so long” before replacing phones in the future. I’m not sure exactly when we got that phone, but it was sometime in 2018. The phone is between five and six years old. We got it near the end of its production run. That particular phone was sold between the spring of 2016 and the fall of 2018. It was state of the art just 7 years ago.
I’m not sure how we became so dependent upon devices that won’t last more than five years, when there are devices that serve for 50 years or more, but there are definite drawbacks to modern technologies. I know we can’t go back. I don’t own a horse and buggy and am unlikely to ever own one. I hope, however, that we find ways to avoid the throwaway nature of contemporary technology. I’d be willing to give up some of the modern conveniences of our wireless society in order to avoid a bit of the waste of rapid obsolescence. Then again, I myself am old. I suspect that the store clerk who was unafraid to keep pushing buttons and googling solutions doesn’t even know how to use a rotary dial phone.
Before I go any further, however, I want to tell the story of a blue princess telephone with a rotary dial. Back in 1978, we moved into a parsonage in southwest North Dakota. It was our first experience of living in a house as a married couple. We had lived in a series of apartments prior to that move. In some of those apartments we had had our own telephone. In some we had shared a phone with others. In those days telephones were connected to the wall by a wire. We didn’t have portable phones. We didn’t talk on the phone in our car. When we worked at a church camp during the summers, we didn’t have a telephone. There was no phone service at the remote mountain location of our camp. Back to 1978, however. We went a bit “wild” with our new home. We had the phone company install a desk phone in the study of our new home. A wall phone was installed in the kitchen. And we asked for and got a third phone - a real luxury - a phone in our bedroom. This third phone was special because you could turn off the ringer so it was silent. That way, when a phone call came in the middle of the night, we could answer without getting out of bed, but we didn’t have the jarring of hearing the phone right next to our heads. We’d hear the phone in another part of the house, but be able to answer from bed.
Another fun detail is that the phone in our kitchen had a 25 foot cord between the wall unit and the handset. With that phone we could walk into the study, the garage, and the dining room as well as be in the kitchen. It was a real luxury compared to the usual 6 food cords that meant that you had to remain in the same place as you talked on the phone. Of course we didn’t talk on the phone much in those days. Long distance calls, which were all calls outside of our county, were 11 cents per minute. We didn’t want to rack up big bills.
Relevant to the story is that in those days, no one owned their own phones. Our phones were leased from Bell Telephone Company, also known as American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) before an anti-trust settlement mandated the breakup of that company into several regional carriers. On January 1, 1984, the operations of AT&T were transferred to seven regional holding companies. Part of the breakup of the company was that individuals were allowed to own their their own phones rather than lease them. We purchased the phones in our house at that time. The newest of those phones was that blue princess phone with a rotary dial that could have its bell silenced.
We kept and used that phone until we had our land line turned off in 2020 when we moved from our house in Rapid City, South Dakota. It had served us in three different homes. It sill works and is compatible with wired phone systems in operation today. However, we no longer have a land line. We rely on our cell phones for all of our communications. If we wanted, however, we could pay to have a land line in our home and that 50-year-old technology would work as designed.
Back to yesterday’s events. At one point in the process of transferring our phone service, one of our cell phones experienced some kind of failure. I don’t know what the problem was. I’m suspicious that the person helping us in the phone store simply kept pushing buttons and making changes to the phone that overwhelmed it, though it is possible that the phone experienced some other kind of malfunction. The result was that the data transfer could not take place from that phone to the new one. We ended up going home and bringing a computer back to the phone store so that we could migrate data from the backup instead of from the original phone. Susan made the trip to pick up the computer while I waited at the phone store as my phone took over two hours to transfer all of its data.
As she was making the trip, I worried for a while. It felt very vulnerable to be in town away from my spouse with neither of us having access to a working phone. I didn’t have access to a vehicle should she need help. She didn’t have a way to call me or send me any messages. Neither of us could contact either of our children. It was a situation that we routinely experienced in years past. There were no problems. She returned safely. We got our new phones working. Life goes on.
While this was going on the clerk in the store kept saying that part of our problems was that one of the phones we were retiring - the one that failed - was simply “so old” that it could not work with “modern” systems. She strongly urged us not to wait “so long” before replacing phones in the future. I’m not sure exactly when we got that phone, but it was sometime in 2018. The phone is between five and six years old. We got it near the end of its production run. That particular phone was sold between the spring of 2016 and the fall of 2018. It was state of the art just 7 years ago.
I’m not sure how we became so dependent upon devices that won’t last more than five years, when there are devices that serve for 50 years or more, but there are definite drawbacks to modern technologies. I know we can’t go back. I don’t own a horse and buggy and am unlikely to ever own one. I hope, however, that we find ways to avoid the throwaway nature of contemporary technology. I’d be willing to give up some of the modern conveniences of our wireless society in order to avoid a bit of the waste of rapid obsolescence. Then again, I myself am old. I suspect that the store clerk who was unafraid to keep pushing buttons and googling solutions doesn’t even know how to use a rotary dial phone.
