An Addendum to the Rotary Phones Post

 As you may have noticed by now, my heart is not really in blogging.  I do have some other ideas for this blog, but I simply haven't taken the time to add to it.  Part of that is my guarded approach to technology, which I'm always trying to suss out.  Why do I feel this way?  I have a cell phone. Why don't I accept it as the way people communicate these days and get on with life?  It's not just current, digital technology either.  When I was in high school, the Sony Walkman came out. My immediate reaction was "who is going to want to walk around with earphones in their ears?  You won't be able to hear the birds singing.  You won't be able to hear vehicles approaching when you cross the street..."  Of course, I eventually bought a walkman and proceeded to have a love/hate relationship with it, and I eventually abandoned it.  There was one period of my life, when I was running in the morning, when I listened to an iPod while running - usually the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street.  For the most part though, my initial assessment of the desirability of walkman type devices has remained constant.  I don't want to walk around in public with earbuds in my ears, and I'm a little suspicious of those who do.  

With the pandemic, and the switch to working from home and working on Zoom, it became clear that our DSL line was woefully inadequate in terms of internet speed, especially after our son abandoned his dorm in Chicago to continue his freshman year of college from his childhood bedroom.  The best the DSL line, (yes I know that's redundant), was about 8 mbps.  So, we ditched the DSL line and signed up for cable internet, which races into the house at 240 mbps.  It's a little bit of overkill, but it certainly kept Zoom meetings and classes from constantly stuttering to a halt when all three of us were on Zoom at the same time.

Unfortunately, that also meant the end of the landline. We were getting both our DSL service and our landline service from a local company, Cybermesa, and they don't do a landline only service. At this point, they don't even seem to advertise their DSL service on their website anymore. They seem to be moving toward microwave transmission and VOIP phone service.

I thought that I could just call up Century Link and order basic phone service, but for some reason, the Century Link website is not helpful, and their customer service seems less so.  I could find references to basic (meaning local) phone service costing $20 a month, but only on other websites.  I finally called, and after a long series of questions and checks, the customer service guy told me I could get their full service for around $70. 

"I want the basic, local service," I replied.

"You can't get the basic service," he said.

"Why?" I asked.

"You have to start with the full service, but you can change it to basic service later," he replied.

At that point, I gave up. I have a cell phone. I have a Google Voice number. I might as well get used to it.

I did not, however, get used to it.  I still looked at the place where the answering machine stood, every time I came in the door, to see if we had any phone messages. The rotary phone sat on my desk in the other room, not plugged into anything.

Why not having a landline bugged me so much is not fully transparent, even to me. I think I like, for one thing, that the phone is tied to the house rather than to me personally.  I am also not very disciplined with my smartphone when it is on, and I have it with me. I think, "I should turn on the cell phone and see if I have any messages." I turn it on - no messages.  But then I check my email, and I start looking through, deleting, and replying to emails.  At this time, as an experiment, I have deleted almost every app off my phone.  I did this after thinking that, what I should really do is buy a lightphone 2, which I think is a very clever, (and desirable), piece of kit as far as cellphones go.  But there I was, thinking I should buy yet another cell phone, whose cell service would be more expensive than what I have, because I seem too undisciplined to trust myself with a mainline smartphone.  So, I approximated the lightphone by deleting almost all my apps.  Still, Still! even having done that, after I check my messages, and check my email, I stare at the phone like a bloody idiot, wondering what other icon I can push. Is my personal discipline really that bad? Or is the addictiveness of the design really that good? Even when I could still get pay-as-you-go service on my Kroger flip phone, which I rather liked, I found I would pull it out of my pocket and look at it, even though I knew it was not the smart phone that I had in my pocket.

That's simply not what I want from a phone. 

A) I want family members to be able to call me if there is an emergency, and I want to be able to see the message within a few hours of getting a cal.

B) I want to be able to sit down at the telephone table and call friends and chat. As I pointed out in the original post, (I believe), I prefer to call people with landlines, so I know they are sitting at their telephone tables as well, rather than walking around a grocery store or driving down the interstate, but my friends with landlines have dwindled to none.

C) I want to be able to order Chinese food from time to time.

That's it, that's all I want from a phone, other than the joy of dialing a telephone dial in an age where it's regarded as an anachronism.

So last week, I got on the online chat with Century Link to see if it was at all possible to get basic landline service. I thought it was going to be an five-to-ten minute exploration of the possibility. What happened, instead, was an odyssey that spanned from 7:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. I won't go into the entire story because it would probably be more boring in the telling than it was in the experience, but I'll give you the highlights.  The initial person on the chat had to transfer me to another person who "handled my area."  That person was very patient and helpful.  Yes, I could get a basic landline.  The first hurdle was they had to check my credit, and I remembered, in an instant, that I had frozen all my credit reports after reading a piece about identity theft on the New York Times website.  She patiently stood by on the chat while I tried to unfreeze my credit.  I went through the phone menu once, but answered somethng wrong, so I had to start over a second time, and then they asked me for my pin, which I had forgotten I even had, so I was transferred and put on hold, but then I remembered the secure place I had stashed my pins, so I started over a third time and succeeded.  My price for the basic local service is around $30 with all the taxes, etc.  Granted, that's still the cost of cell service for the lightphone, but it's worth it to me to put the rotary phone back into play.

Then, there was an issue with my requesting my old phone number. I needed a pin from Cybermesa in order for them to request a transfer of the number from Cybermesa to me. I called Cybermesa (on my work landline), while I was still on the original chat and was given an email to email for the pin. Then, that original person told me that I did not need to worry about the pin, but the last thing instructions she gave me, at the end of our long transaction, was to call a number for a "third party verification."

The verification did not have the number, the "billing telephone number", listed.  They kept trying to transfer me to Century Link, where I would be on hold for a long time before the call was dropped.

At one point, I got back on the chat, and the person on the other end told me that the third party verification could not go through because the service had not been started, and she could not explain why the first person said I had to perform said verification before the service could be started. (At this point, I was becoming impatient.)

I was given another number to call, and I reached someone and discovered that I did need a pin from Cybermesa after all. I emailed them, and though they did not use pins, they gave me my old account number, which seemed to mollify the person on the phone.  The person I reached this time, however, was a kindly grandfather-sounding person.  The kind of person who had advice for everything. "We need to have someone come by your house," he said, "to ensure that the service is turned on properly." "I won't be there," I said, "I will be at work. It worked fine before." ("Just flip the damn switch," I wanted to say but didn't.) Luckily, some people had stepped into my office at that moment, so I had to tell him goodbye. "I can't speak with you anymore," I said. "I have people standing in my office waiting for me."  "You don't even have time to do the third party verification?" he asked. "No," I said, and hung up.

The next person I reached took up the same line that the technician would be at the house on July 30th, and I would need to be there. "I have to be at work," I said. "Oh," he said, "according to this, a technician really doesn't need to come by your house. I'll just get rid of that part."

Finally, at the end of hours of effort, I was transferred to the third party verification, which I completed.

I don't remember Google Fi taking all that long to sign up for.

So, Murphy's Law not withstanding, our landline should be turned back on this Friday, with the phone number we've had since we got married in 1996. I have a new answering machine already setup and ready to take messages. "We're calling because the warranty for your software has expired, and we desperately need you to give us your credit card and social security numbers, so we can ensure that all your information remains safe and secure!"

I did find two things of interest. Another pulse to tone converter, the Dialgizmo, that allows you to dial both the * and the # by dialing 1 or 2 and holding it for two seconds before releasing it. I ordered one, though they say it is not for use on PSTN lines, but only for VOIP. They add that it should still work, but you should not use it, leading me to believe it has something to do with regulations.

Old phone works also has something with similar capabilities you can wire into the phone itself - the Rotatone. I'm not quite ready to rewire the phone, but I may give it a shot someday.  I like to tinker to a certain extent.

I also found websites that claim rotary (pulse) dialing should still work for PSTN lines, but it never worked very well for me on our DSL line, even with the DSL filter on the line.  I will be curious to see if it works any better without DSL altogheter.