New Phone Technology Has Familiar Ring

Until I was about 10 years old, we
didn't have dial phones.
It wasn't quite like it was on "Lassie."
We didn't crank: the phone up and say,
"Jennie give me the General Store." We
were much more cosmopolitan. There was
a telephone company in the next town
filled with operators who would say,
"Number please" when you picked up the
phone. I would say either 3854 which was
my friend Catherine 's number, 2398 which was Mona and Pam's number (they lived kitty-corner to us), or 4048m2, which was Cindy's number. Her family lived out in the country, so they had to have a party line.
Then one day everything was switched to dial phones. We got a dial tone and prefix added to our number. Ours was Juno 4.
We thought it was a real dumb name. Why couldn't it have been something more fashionable sounding like Magnolia 3 or Chantilly 5.
Best of all was the rotary dialing. We took turns holding the receiver button down and practicing dialing numbers.
Coming back to 1988, people have pleaded with us to do something about the phone. I was always hearing, "A family the size of yours, with only one phone line coming into the house, without a call-waiting button anywhere to be pressed, is impossible to call. The line is always busy."
I hesitated to make the change. All that beeping and interrupting whenever I spoke to other people who had call waiting made me nervous. I always wanted to end my conversation in the middle of a three-syllable word and let the party go on to answer the other call from someone who might be important.
I didn't think I got enough important calls to warrant having an extra line busting into my conversations all the time.
What if I had call waiting and I finally was having an important conversation?
Maybe it would be from a sweepstakes spokesman telling me where to pick up my prize money, when in the middle of his directions the phone would beep and a little voice would come on asking for three-year-old Pete.
Those notions are now gone. Not only have I sunk 10 that mode of telephoning, I have succumb even further. We also got a teen line.
The day I realized it was time to plug into telephone expansion, I couldn't use the phone to place the order. I was waiting for a call, so I couldn't make the call because I didn't want to tie up the line.
Several other people in the house also wanted to make calls but I wouldn' t let them. This meant the line was open to our house and friends were keeping it warm. However, I was telling them to keep it short, real short. All they were allowed to say was, "I can't talk now, my mom is waiting for a call."
A few seconds later another friend would call. As the kids popularity seemed to be escalating, my policies' popularity was rapidly de-escalating.
The next morning I ordered a teen line, which comes with call waiting and three way calling and call waiting for my own phone. The family was jubilant and quickly called their friends with the good news. Then they all had advice as to where the new teen line phone jacks should be installed. These suggestions all sounded the same, "Put it in my room."
That decision was eliminated when the telephone man came. "Your house is already wired for two lines. If you would like I can easily hook up your second line to all your existing phone jacks and then you'd have two lines throughout the house.
"That's a great idea. What about phones?"
"You'll have to get different phones with two lines in order to use the second line."
That's what we did but so far I have only purchased one extra phone and it is in the kitchen. ''That's not a convenient place to carry on a conversation," Colleen has informed me.
The little guys who never used the phone before are having a wonderful time. They call each other between the new and old lines. They call our old number when Colleen is visiting with her friends and then fall on the floor laughing when she answers the call waiting call and realizes it is her young siblings.
History repeats itself once again.
October 12, 1988