And you’d answer by reeling off your phone number. As if that was going to stop a wrong number being confused that you’re not Margaret.
I mean, caller ID has been a thing for a while. I remember when I was a kid in the 90s knowing which phone numbers I could answer, like my grandma, and the ones I didn’t know were to go to “the machine”. (Answering machine is what we used to call voice mail.)
It was a separate box even, so on the end table we had the cordless phone with the giant antenna that would get staticky when I used my RC cars, the tiny box with a tiny screen that showed the number calling, and a separate answering machine.
I remember later when we upgraded to a cordless phone that had multiple receivers each with built in caller id and the base station had built in voice mail… and then we never used it because we all had cell phones by then.
No one in my family had caller ID in the 90’s because it cost extra.
Caller ID wasn’t super widespread in the UK until the 00s IIRC
I definitely remember dialling 1471 to figure out who just rang in the 00s anyway (BT equivalent of *69 in America)
That’s literally how doors work. Someone knocks and it could be your sister’s boyfriend or your dad’s boss or your best friend or a marketer.
And people used to just do that unannounced.
Now we always send a txt to be safe they won’t just ignore us
Not a fan of those either TBH
The aggressive thing was not covering the receiver when yelling at your brother, who wasn’t even home “it’s your gf, you in?” Wait a few seconds then yell “no, the one with the big ears” and a few seconds later inform the poor girl on the phone that your brother wasn’t available.
I’m just realizing how much I missed this. I think I need a landline.
Nah, “oh, they’re in the bathroom right now, sounds like it could be a while”
Peak little brothering.
Yeah and sometimes, before my voice broke, I would be mistaken for my older sister when her boyfriend called. Which was awkward for everybody involved.
I too got a story like this: My sibling’s partner confused us - not to blame him, we do sound alike. I picked up and he gleefully invited me on a date. I deadpan handed the phone to my sibling.
If you wanted to call someone, you first pick up the receiver and listen. You might suddenly be eavesdropping on another person’s call, and you might try to convince them to hang up right there in the call.
Teenagers would beg their parents to get them a second line so they could talk to their friends without getting interrupted.
On a more rare occasion, someone might have left the receiver off the hook. When you do that, it would make a terrible racket for a short while, then it would give up. So if you needed the phone, you’d pick up the receiver and nothing would happen. You had to go through the house to each phone and make sure it was hung up.
I think what’s your describing was called a “party line”. My grandma had one of those, and when an incoming call was for her, the bell would ring two times. If it rang one time, it was for her neighbor.
What I am describing is one line to one house, but with multiple phone jacks inside the house.
A party line was the same thing, but with one line shared for multiple houses.
You had to have multiple jacks, because the phone cord was only so long. No one wants to go running through the house to get to the phone before it stops ringing.
Are they not building houses with phone jacks anymore? I mean, I know “no one” has a landline, but not even the wiring?
I wouldn’t pay an electrician to wire R45 through the house in 2026, that seems pointless. Even if I had a house phone it’d be VoiP
I think you meant RJ11. Ethernet uses RJ45.
But that’s just the jack. Either can use CAT5/6/7 cabling and most RJ11 in more recent homes is still CAT5 or better. But that doesn’t mean the builders didn’t staple it to the studs making it worthless for anything more than 10BASE-T (if even that).
Yes, thank you. I wasn’t aware that cat 6 could carry a phone signal but I don’t see why not, just use fewer leads?
Yep! Four twisted pairs. Each can carry a phone line. Tip and ring!
Might be worth having someone run cat6e in a similar fashion though. I had it done in my previous house and it was glorious.
Mine had some wiring for it when i moved in in 2014, but we never used it and removed them as we came across them since we knew its not needed ever again at this point. Same with coax for cable tv which we did use for a few years but switched to streaming and from what i see even cable boxes are just wifi and connect back to the demarc point were they installed the main box. Only one we kept was the coax coming into the house for internet which is or can still be used for now.
With that said i absolutely want to run CAT6 cable through the house were the basement has 1 spot with a switch that has 1 feed to the main floor back to the demarc and same for the 1st floor. I hate wifi and sure its great for phones and stuff, but if i can have my tv streaming boxes, pcs, and gaming consoles on wired then i absolutely will do that instead. As someone who works in IT, the number one complaint i see is employees working from home and cant figure out why voip calls or meetings sound awful until i point out their terrible wifi situation from either not being close enough to it or still using that 10 year old service provider all in one router.
The house I’m living in is over 10 years old and has zero phone jacks.
Also, eventually people got those cordless phones to get around the cord length/tangling problem.
My childhood home (where I currently live) is 50 years old. Not only is there a phone jack in the kitchen wall, but the master bedroom has a 4-ft phone line coming out of the wall. Like, a literal permanent line. There’s a plastic box on the wood trim next to the floor and the line is spliced and wired into that box. If the line breaks, we need to pull off the box and splice a new cable to the connectors inside.
That line used to be connected to a small rotary dial phone, but the phone was removed years ago.
Also, the kitchen originally had a large rotary dial phone hanging on the wall when I was a kid. I’m a millennial (in my early 40s), but my parents had kids late in their life, so they’re really old (my dad isn’t a boomer; he’s actually from the silent generation!). So they grew up with rotary phones, and thus I grew up with one too.
Also, eventually people got those cordless phones to get around the cord length/tangling problem.
My parents solved this problem by buying a 15-ft phone cord for the kitchen phone. You could wander anywhere in the kitchen, dining room, and a few steps into the living room from the kitchen phone.
I have OCD and was obsessed with untangling the curly phone lines, so my family never had to worry about that.
When touch tone phones came out, the phone companies had this brilliant idea to scam more money out of people and charged extra to use touch tone. So, my parents didn’t want to pay for that and used rotary phones long after they went out of fashion. And even the touch tone phones they bought had a switch to set them to “dial pulse” mode.
I still remember some guests’ looks of astonishment when they went to dial a number and the phone didn’t make the expected noise. Some even had no idea how a rotary phone worked.
I begged my mother for a second line…. But it was for my modem. So i could stay online longer lol
Did she get you a second line?
nope heh
bummer
That last bit reminds me of a prank that my friends and I used to play in high school in the 90s. We would make a Beigebox, which is just a normal landline phone with alligator clips on the cord instead of the normal connector. You could use the alligator clips to attach the beigebox to someone’s phone line from the exterior of their house, at the phone junction box. We would do this, take the phone off the hook and hide it. Their phone would be tied up until they found and disconnected it. Sometimes it would take them days (or contacting the phone company from another line) to find the issue. If we were feeling particularly malicious, we would dial internationally or a 900 number instead of just leaving it off the hook.
Reading this back now, I feel like to Gen Z this prank reads like “In the previous century, I would play a naughty trick by filling the chamber pot of mine enemy with adobe so that it cannot be cleaned.”
There are cool pranks. But this is just being a piece of shit. It’s as funny as flattening a tire.
A big part of being a teenager is being a piece of shit. If it makes you feel better, I realized that my friends doing this never stopped being pieces of shit and I cut them out of my life.
You kinda missed one of the major reasons of why phreakers built the beigeboxes. We used them to find lines that were connected to the phone company switches but not hooked up to any subscriber, so that we could make expensive calls that nobody would have to pay for. For example, long-distance or Internet dialup.
The beigebox was basically just a DIY Lineman’s Handset (LMHS), a common tool used by telco workers for troubleshooting when doing field work.
You’re my hero.
That’s not a prank. That could ruin someone’s life. What if some relative was dying and the victim didn’t find out because you cut their phone line?
What if they needed to call 000(911) in an emergency?
I wouldn’t see this as a joke, man.
One time I answered a fax.
I’ve done that, too, and I even was on the other side of that a few times. You go to send a fax, and it has a speaker so you can hear it connect, but instead, you hear a person’s voice saying hello. Feels bad. Not all faxes had speakers like that, so I probably did it more often than I know about.
It inspired one of the great classics though
That top comment… give that man a friend.
Yeah, that hit hard.
It certainly made you practice your manners if you were talking to the dad of your crush.
“Hey Gramps, be a good little sheepshagger and get me Madam Fuckalicious on the horn, will ya?”
I see you also grew up in the phone call era
Greetings, fellow geezer!
get me Madam Fuckalicious
so disappointed that this wasn’t the username of op or the person you are replying to
It’s free. You can have it.
MadamFuckalicious@blahaj.zone. It’s a gamble.
True story: As a little kid, my mom taught us to answer the phone as such, “McTubbs residence, Fudgy speaking.” I still carry that etiquette to this day.
Fishmonger, I’d like to speak to your daughter
click. Buzzing tone
I would like 3 halibut please! Delivered to my doorstep
The world was different when you had to walk the streets and have random encounters with others.
It was fine.
The Best part of that time was not being expected to be personally available every minute of the day. The phone was a part of your house and not a part of you.
was not being expected to be personally available every minute of the day
I’m just not and people get used to it. I take some days to answer to texts, often leave my phone where I can’t hear it and it kind of works fine. If it’s really important, people usually try several times.
Same here. I check it a couple of times per day but rarely have it on my person all the time. It’s usually on mute or vibrate, and I’ve set most notifications to hidden/silent except for the ones that matter to me.
I like the DND feature that mutes everything but rings for repeated calls within a certain time frame - that way if it’s something important enough, I can get notified the second time around, otherwise I can toss my phone somewhere and not be bothered until I decide to look at it again.
I will never understand why android removed the ability to easily set notifications per app and per contact. my blackberry and my first android were great for that
now my phone just lives on silent and I’ll maybe respond to somebody within a few days
Telemarketing did ruin it. This was the main reason people bought answering machines, to screen calls. Missing calls wasn’t a big deal for most people, it was the telemarketing that drove people to buy answering machines, and then to get caller ID, and the ability to block calls, etc. Telemarketing was a boon for the phone service providers.
If you’re anxious about answering your phone it all started with telemarketing.
It’s amazing how communication mediums seem to become so saturated by marketing that it essentially destroys them.
Phone calls, mail, fax, email.
At the very least, I’m extremely disappointed in the government for destroying phone calls (or standing back and just letting them get destroyed). The nature of a phone network lends itself well to placing responsibility on the caller. Absolutely enforceable. No will to do so.
Like, you actually need a permit to do door to door sales. That’s GOOD. Copy-paste that legislation for phones.
I’d be 100x happier with my tax dollars hunting down and punishing phone abusers than funding a speed trap.
I am so fucking mad email is ruined by telemarketing. It would be so fucking convenient if not for spam. Kinda hate that it’s how you sign up to anything now too like some weird id.
Don’t forget the entire internet, newspapers, telephone listings, radio, television, movies, video games, every surface of a store, public spaces like parks and sidewalks, and probably your dreams in the near future
Advertising is cancer and it destroys anything that tolerates it for even a moment. An industry with zero ethics or morals. If you work in advertising you’re a disgusting scumbag piece of shit and your parents are ashamed. No amount of money is worth it and the world would be objectively better without you in it.
Advertising should be illegal outside very specific instances, imo.
When a person needs a thing, they should seek it out.
That we’re constantly bombarded by marketing is not spoken of enough as the tragedy that it truly is.
How terrible, learning social skills for talking to a diversity of people and contexts.
In the very early days of the Internet, if your mom’s friend called to gossip it meant you had to reset the 5 hour countdown on downloading that single image.
MOMMMMM!!!
Happy mother’s day all
The edging was INSANE back then.
We didn’t have call waiting, so for us it was literally just no using the internet before 9pm because you didn’t know who might call
For those too young to know, call waiting is standard now your phone tells you when you get a call while on another call, but this used to be a paid upgrade feature and if you didn’t have it, the person calling you would get a busy signal (instead of ringing it would just beep) and you had no way to know.
