Hanging on the Telephone

I have had an urge for a while to write about the telephone.

What an oddly mundane topic, right?  A bit random too I suppose.  But here we are.

By the time I was old enough to be aware of what a telephone was, it was already an appliance in nearly every home.  By default homes in the suburban tracts of Silicon Valley where I grew up had a wall mounted rotary dial, set about 5 feet up the wall, in the kitchen/dining area, often with a long springy, spiral cord so you could roam about most of that area of the house.

The one in the house I grew up in was black, but my grandmother’s house had a yellow one, very much like the one pictured below.

The phone on the wall in Mountain View

I grabbed that image from an Etsy store that specializes in restoring old phones.  That was much easier than digging out the actual phone from my grandmother’s house, which I snagged some 30 years ago when cleaning it out, and which is in a box in the garage somewhere.  Or I am pretty sure it is.

Our house only had the one phone, but you could have the phone company come out and install an extension in another room.  Same phone number, different phone.  My grandmother had a matching yellow desktop rotary phone on the nightstand next to her bed, a popular location for a second phone in many houses.  My grandparents… my father’s parents… also had a second phone in their house, a conservative black model, that sat on the big desk in what one would call the study or the den.

The Western Electric Model 500, a fixture on desks and counters for decades

Image once again borrowed from the site linked above, although this time I do not have this actual model stored in the garage anywhere.  I kind of wish I did.

I still remember the phone numbers attached to most of those phones.  Not only were they printed on that little circle of paper inserted in the center of the dial by the phone company, but they never changed.  My ability to remember them is because I dialed them so many times in my life when I was young no doubt.

There are exceptions.  My father’s parents were less apt to use the phone, and looked on it as a bit of an intrusion into their home.  We rarely called them at home.  The phone ringing at their house was generally expected to be on the order of national news or a death in the family, or such was my 6 year old view of things.

Then again, they were also out on a farm in the central valley of California, in the 209 area code, which was very rural.  The one time I can remember using their phone to call home and wish my dad a happy birthday, I had to go through an operator to make what was a long distance call to our home in the 408 area code.

You dialed the number, to the operator your central office extension (last four digits of your phone number) and the are code and number you wanted to reach, and the operator made the connection for you.  And the operator was almost always female.

This was around 1975 or so.

Otherwise, the phone at their house only rang when there was bad news.  We visited them in person or wrote them letters otherwise.  Being on the farm was like being on an island.

By this point you might be getting to the “cool story bro, but what is the point here, why the telephone thing?” level of engagement here.  I mean, we’ve all used a phone, right?

The thing is, the phone and phone related technologies are something of a through line in my life.  Bilbo’s poem about the path from your house leading you to far away places if you don’t take care resonates with me when it comes to the phone.

My apparent lifelong need to communicate with strangers didn’t start with Twitter or this blog or forums or UseNet.  I was calling random people on the phone, often in strange and sometimes unlawful ways, back when I was in grammar school.

And telephone related technology has been the central path for most of my career.  I had a modem back in 1986 (purchased from Potshot) and learning that and starting a BBS gave me a leg up when suddenly modems became very important.  I managed to get my first few jobs in tech largely because I knew about modems and the company needed that knowledge.

I have, over the years, gotten jobs, promotions, and special assignments because I knew about modems, fax protocols, caller ID, ISDN, speech recognition, Voice XML, and how to program various phone line simulators.

I was almost never an expert at any of those things.  It was always a matter of being the one eyed guy in the land of the blind.  And so most of my career has been influenced by the telephone and related technology.  I spent a long run in interactive voice response… automated telephone answering systems, the hated phone tree where getting to a live person is often a chore… to the extent that it is likely that if you live in the US and you’re over 30 you have probably heard something I have worked on.

Even now, in my current job, while I am fully away from phone technology, I still work on apps that have to function on a smart phone.

Anyway, be warned.  Posts about phones are in the offing.  This is the intro post.  I’ll get into tales from my youth soon enough.