Back in the ’60s when we were young kids, most families shared a phone line with another household. In our case, it was with an old widowed woman who lived down the road.
There were seven people in our household and we had one non-mobile phone located in the livingroom. It was difficult enough to get a turn to use the phone at my house with that many people living there, but what made it worse was sharing our line with the widowed woman. You see, if she was using her telephone, we couldn’t use ours.
Don’t ask me how this modern marvel of technology worked – both households had separate phone numbers, but both her phone number and our phone number shared a line. Get it?
If old lady battle-axe was using her telephone, and someone from my family, say me, picked up the receiver to make a call while she was using her phone, I did not get a dialtone, but rather could hear her long boring conversation about whatever ailment was ailing her at the time and about all the ailments of whoever she was talking to, too. It was way too much personal information for a public telephone line, in my opinion, not that I was listening.
And, of course, we would have to wait until she finished before we could use the phone. Sometimes, while one of us was having a conversation with one of our friends, we could hear her pick up her phone and after a minute or two or three, put it back in its cradle, occasionally rather loudly. Usually after one or two pickups, she would interrupt our call to say, “Get off the phone, I have an important call to make.” Well, she did that all the time, and as typical children, we ignored her.
Our shared party line existence got ugly. That old woman would wait until we got home home from school, when we would naturally want to use the phone to call the friends we had just been with all day, to use it herself and tie up the line. Sometimes, we would pick up the receiver and hear her in her kitchen preparing her dinner or in her living room watching her television, talking to no one on the phone, but keeping it off the hook so we couldn’t use it, keeping it available for her own use.
Looking back now, I think she must have hated sharing a phone line with us. From her perspective, I bet she thought we were rude little hellions. She’d have been right, I suppose.
You know what else I’m thinking? That this was my life just a mere 40 years ago. Ancient, depending on your perspective.
We’ve come a long way, baby.
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