Trash Talk

Trash Talk

          I think its fair to suggest that the era of telephone land lines, an important part of our communications network for 100-125 years, is dead.  The growth of land-lines pretty much happened in the normal exponential curve that can be seen for any new technological innovation.  It began with the Bell patent in 1876, grew to a few million installed lines in 1905, got nationalized as a strategic asset by the government in 1918 and then grew steadily through the twentieth century until the 1980’s.  The international growth curve was similar in the developed world but staggered behind the U.S.  And in the developing world it was even later and overwhelmed by the advent of wireless.  We are now at an important inflection moment when only 45.9% of the U.S. population have land lines while 50.8% have a cell phone. I bet if you polled those 45.9% you would find only a fraction of them would say they really want to keep the land line versus just leaning on inertia.

          For our part, when we moved in May 2018 we kept our telephone number and kept the land line service mostly because it was bundled with fiber optical cable (Verizon Fios) for the TV.  However, we had not been answering our land line phone for several years (the message machine, whether stand-alone or imbedded in the phone, has long since been sent to the Smithsonian) since the calls were all telemarketers.  So, we didn’t even bother setting up the phones, so the line just dead-ends I guess.  At our home in San Diego we NEVER answer the land lines for the same reasons and now we don’t even use the phone company for our TV service since there is no fiber optics.  Guess which service is next to be cancelled?

Wait a minute, did we all realize that when we were growing up phones were wired, and TV was wireless and now that’s reversed?  Hey, wait a minute, are we being telecommunicationally played?  I know we all understand the rudimentary technological trends of broadband and cellular and sort of get it, but it remains intriguing to ponder.  I can’t be the first to observe this.

At the office, we have a phone system, but don’t even have a receptionist since we get so few calls on the land line.  I do use the land line and especially the land line in the conference room (Polycom) for outgoing group calls.  If I were zero-basing this for business, I would give everyone a cell phone credit and cancel all land lines except for the conference rooms. And now we have graduated to the next generation of video-conferencing.  Skype has given way to Zoom, a free video conferencing service (they are going public with God-knows what business model, but you better assume that your data privacy is being eroded just a tad more for this).  You can now use Zoom on a desktop, a laptop, an iPad or an iPhone/Android with equal ease.  Pretty slick and all free.

I think all of that says clearly that the land line is, for all intents and purposes, dead man walking.  Hell, we don’t even have permanently installed cell phones in our cars anymore (remember those?).  I can no longer step into any of my cars without being automatically bluetoothed directly into my car speaker and computer system. There is a little competing connectivity between my wife or other users of the car, but even that is easy enough to resolve without looking it up in the manual.  I have established primacy in my vehicles, so they default to me.  Luckily my wife finds this sort of Alpha Dog nonsense silly, so she doesn’t fight it.  This is where I am supposed to crush a beer can on my forehead and grunt.

We are all about our personal communicators now and they are with us everywhere.  We still haven’t reconciled whether we call them cellphones, smartphones or mobiles, but that may just remain as a touch of personal flair and not have to be firmly locked down.  We have even gone past Star Trek with its flip-communicators, since we don’t need such affectations to know we are on our phones.  Most people easily walk along the street in New York City, talking away to thin air either through wired or wireless ear buds.  The City just put in place a new ordinance against texting or talking on a cell phone while crossing the street.  Wise move.  Let me be the first to suggest a replacement of the term “jaywalking”.  The term “jay” refers to an idiot, so maybe we can just leave that alone and still call it jaywalking.  Seems appropriate.

Now then, cell phones have been great for many reasons but one of them is that there is no phone listing or white pages.  If you don’t give people your cell number they can’t get it through directory assistance.  Pretty crazy and contradictory in the era of social media that we have suddenly gotten very hush-hush about our cell phone numbers when before anyone could find anyone in the white pages unless you went to the lengths of being “unlisted”.  Wooo…unlisted seemed so, remote and detached.  Additionally, we didn’t get lots of dinner-time telemarketing.

That’s all over now it seems.  I get as many or more calls on my cell phone that are spam (which is baloney and not so horrible if fried up). I get daily calls from China (or at least in Chinese), Lithuania, Albania, and, for some odd reason, San Marcos California.  You can tell them immediately based on the momentary delay and the call center background noise (do these people not realize how obvious they are?).  The robo-calls are the silliest.  Who would stay on a robo-call one second longer than needed unless they were so bored that they needed any kind of distraction?  I can’t empirically determine if I am now getting more trash calls on my cell than I used to get on my land line, but at least now we have that great iPhone feature that lets us block all calls from the numbers we don’t want to hear from.  That probably helps a little, but it doesn’t seem very exclusive anymore to get added new lines from which to spam. 

I was a banker long enough to know that these scammers that steal your money need a bank that is corrupt enough to receive the funds and then shrug when the authorities try to track down the perpetrator.  Those banks can be shut down eventually.  I suppose those cell carriers could equally be shut down if reported.  There should be an iPhone app that automatically reports spam calls.  What I am now awaiting is a spam call trying to sell me a land line on the cheap if I can just transfer money into an internet bank account through my Venmo account.  Then I’ll know its time to hang up my spurs.