Our clunky black rotary dial phone was mounted on the kitchen wall when I was growing up. It was loud and rang so seldom that the whole family jumped when we got a call.
We were conditioned to ignore the calls that were just one long ring. Those were for Mrs. Cain down the street who shared a party line with us.
If there were two shorter rings, my mother answered because the calls were usually for her. Neighborhood ladies were checking on canasta and bridge schedules or a coconut pie recipe.
Once in a while, one of the men who worked for my dad at the paper mill would call in sick. He always asked my mother to take a message even when he was sitting under the phone drinking coffee.
Both of my parents had big families, but they didn’t spend much time on the phone with them. Long distance calls were expensive.
Most of the calls they got from relatives were about somebody dying or being in the hospital. My dad called one of my aunts when my mother had to have surgery and asked her to pass the word along.
When I got junior high age, my friends and I would talk on the phone about baseball and bicycles. My dad cut those calls short with the explanation that phones should be free for important calls.
If the phone rang three or four times a day, my dad would announce that he was having it taken out because the constant ringing was driving him crazy.
I think about that now when our home phones and cell phones ring continually with those exasperating robocalls from people all over the world trying to sell something or pull off some scam.
There is usually a guy on the phone who says his name is Charles or Robert that can barely speak English and has never been near this country. He is selling cruises or home security systems.
Some of the calls are from people who say they represent a police union or some charitable organization. They need a little donation, and we can put it on our credit cards.
Most of these solicitation calls, though, are not even from live people. They are just recorded voices warning us that our vehicle warranties are about to expire or our student loan payment is late.
There are robocalls about possible problems with the Internal Revenue Service and our health insurance and a lot of other things designed to get money or personal information from us.
The Federal Communications Commission receives a half-million complaints a day about telephone sales pitches and robocalls that now exceed 10 billion a year.
We are advised not to answer calls from unknown numbers, but these calls are showing up on our caller ID’s from numbers in local area codes and even with our own prefixes. Some of them show the names of the cities where we live.
Authorities say 22 million Americans lost more than $10 billion last year in phone scams. They suggest that we should hang up and not say a word when we get these calls.
If a caller asks if we can hear them and we say “yes,” they can record it to use as proof that we accepted a sales offer or approved a charge to a credit card or bank account.
Technology wizards have invented phones that open when they recognize our face or fingerprint. They created devices that address us verbally with questions and directions to any place we want to go. It seems they could find a way to stop the unwanted calls.
I saw this proliferation of phone activity coming in the 1950s when we expanded our home telephone system by adding extension phones in other rooms to our wall-mounted rotary dial phone. As Barney Fife used to say, we should have nipped it in the bud.
We quit asking Earline, our local operator, to get people on the phone and started dialing them ourselves. Then we got phones with push-button dialing and no party lines. We didn’t have to get black phones. They came in green and tan.
It was just a matter of time until we were taking cell phones with us everywhere, mainly to answer robocalls from people who wanted to sell us things and get to our credit cards and bank accounts.
We should have nipped it in the bud when those push-button phones came along.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES