Really Wired Stuff

You know, it's true that we've exchanged more hellos since the advent and proliferation of mobile telephony—well—at least, in the sense that phones these days have enough charge just to send out a quick, mistyped hello before turning into a pocket mirror and mobile networks these days hold up long enough to let us holler a few garbled hellos before moving on to serve customers of another dimension.

Well, the truth sickens me more than you can imagine. It sickens me that somewhere along the way, showing the world an excessively filtered image of our least-ugly toenail became more important than a good quality voice call with someone. This change in priority has led our phone manufacturers and network providers to believe that internet quality is more important to customers than call quality. And that mindset is OK—if internet actually worked—but it just doesn't. The connection usually lasts long enough for Google to prompt, 'If you just said something, I didn’t hear what it was.'

So while our gaze is tightly fixed on the interminable ads that YouTube plays, there exists, behind our inattentive backs, a lesser-known, seldom-used network of good-quality voice calls. It's still used quite a lot in most offices, mind you, and in fact, you might have just seen one today or in the last one week. So let me reintroduce you to...

The Great Landline Telephone!

If you're a millennial, you will have seen one of these before for certain, unless of course, you're a Weasley. However, if you're one of those tetchy, young teenagers whose first words were Candy Crush Saga instead of goo-goo ga-ga, here's a rough description of a landline phone: it's a squarish plastic device with a prominent handle on one side of its face. Now that's called the receiver: it's what you slap against your face to hear and speak. To call, you simply lift it, push the numbers on the number pad, and the rest is just like a mobile phone.

The quality of the call isn't going to be earth-shatteringly better, but I assure you that you won't ever have to dial twenty times only to hear a pathetic sorry message about the network's inability to put you through to someone who's practically hugging the cell tower, and redial another forty times to clarify your food order for 'six tea cakes', not 'sixty cakes'.

Right, so it's quite obvious why we can't carry around a wired, textbook-sized phone in our pockets—duh—it doesn't have a selfie camera on the receiver! But here's what we can do—we can consciously locate as many useable landline phones as we can in our everyday surroundings—and actually use them whenever possible. I reckon that if at least one of the two callers is using a landline, the call should be somewhat decent. It beats christening an old owl Errol and tossing it out of the window with a parchment around its leg I suppose.

And tetchy, young teenager, if you're still reading this, know that some landline telephones are sophisticated enough to have a digital display and speed dial. Store your grandmum's number in there, and do you know what you get? Insta-gram!

Until next time...

Vignesh