Landline phones. I miss them. Not just for nostalgic reasons but for practical ones too. But first, a trip down memory lane. I owe it that tribute.
I was five when we got out first landline phone. We were the first ones in our colony to get one. I still remember the four-digit number allotted to our instrument.
There was no dial. The instrument was an angular, no-nonsense box of black plastic which, in retrospect, looked ugly. One picked up the receiver, waited for the operator to say, “Number please.” One lisped out the number, reading it carefully from a handwritten phone diary, and waited while some inexplicable voodoo brought your friend to the phone, via their parent.
I remember distinctly when the government-owned telecom company announced that you could book telegrams through your phone. For this, a bunch of commonly use telegram scripts were printed on the new phone directory. You just told the operator the address of the recipient and the number of the telegram text you wanted to send. The charge for this would appear on the monthly bill, and that would be that.
Sadly though, telegrams were notoriously slow those days. You often arrived at the destination fifteen days after you sent off a telegram informing your hosts of your arrival, and the telegram came after you. By which time, there was no point, of course.
And aunt once came for a visit with her three young kids. She had duly sent the telegram a month prior. My parents never got the blessed thing and went off on a week long holiday. When they returned, they found that my aunt had been parked at our neighbour’s house for four days. The fun part is, no one thought anything of it, least of all the neighbour.
But I digress, as always.
I miss landlines for many reasons. The biggest one is the telephone directory one got every two years, duly updated. The directory contained your name, address and phone number… out in the open, sans the security of firewall or OTP. A security nightmare, yes.
But, and this is the crux of my missing.
It wasn’t a security nightmare! Nobody gave a damn about having access to your address, name and permanent phone number. Permanent because changing the number wasn’t as easy as breaking a SIM in two and flushing it down the toilet, buying a new SIM and inserting it into your phone. You got the phone after five to seven years of waiting. It was nearly impossible to change it… not on a whim anyway.
Maybe I miss those times when you didn’t have to look over your shoulder all the time. You didn’t need to have your guard up constantly. You didn’t need to distrust common courtesies, wondering who was going to take advantage of you.
Even today, my number has not changed in two decades. But I’ve blocked strangers who got it from a delivery app and have deleted contacts I don’t trust.
I still get the occasional call from someone who is trying to scam me. As for social media, that’s a labyrinth I don’t want to examine, let alone enter.
My phone knows far more about me than my old neighbour ever did, and yet I trust it considerably less.
There’s something almost quaint about a world where your name, address and number sat printed in a book delivered to every phone subscriber in the city, and nobody thought to weaponise it.
Perhaps people were kinder then. Or they were less criminal minded. I think the machinery to abuse that kind of openness simply hadn’t been invented yet. It took the internet to teach us to be afraid of our own listed address.
I don’t actually want the four-digit number back. Or the fifteen-day telegram. Or that ugly black box with no dial. What I want is the thing it accidentally gave us: a phone number that worked like an address, not like a weapon. A wait that was inconvenient rather than anxious. A trust that wasn’t naive—just unexamined, because nobody had yet handed us a reason to examine it.
Until she passed away, my aunt often told us the story of those four days at the neighbour’s house, with fresh embellishments each time. There was no resentment in the recounting, just fondness. The telegram, the OG snail-mail, had handed her a small, accidental adventure. I doubt anyone’s ever going to tell a fond story like that about a WhatsApp message that failed to send.
Which outdate tech do you wish was still around?
