John McLoone

Phone calls used to be private business. When I was a kid, my earliest memories that surrounded the telephone were that we had a party line. You’d pick up the phone and one of your neighbors could be talking on it.

Because of the intrusion of privacy, this evolved as technology advanced into each home having its own phone number. You used to have to stand next to the phone that was mounted on the wall in the kitchen. The cord was maybe two feet long. The next evolution came when you could plug in a cord and have free run of your kitchen. I’m guessing that was a big advancement for the housewife looking to keep up on neighborhood news. I’m not being a chauvinist. I’m just thinking back to my experience. I came home from school for lunch every day, and many days my mom whipped my meal together while never getting off the phone with Mag. She had free run of the entire counter and all cupboards.

Portable phones then offered even more privacy. You picked it up off the charger and could get a full 30 feet away with the original versions.

My dad put a separate phone line in our house. I had five sisters, and no important calls were getting through on our kitchen phone, so the kids had their own line. Mom could talk to Mag and someone else could be on the phone at the same time. My sisters would have the long cord run into their bedrooms where they would discuss weighty things with their friends, like was Barry or Robin Gibb cuter, I suspect.

The telephone has evolved in a different direction, and I don’t care for it.

We all have cell phones, which should offer the ultimate ability to keeping your phone calls to yourself. Instead, it seems to be going the other direction. Am I the last person who doesn’t only speak with people on speaker phone?

Please stop. I’m begging you. No one wants to hear you talk on the phone. Hold the thing up to your head and have a normal conversation, please. If you think holding it up to your head will allow aliens to control your brain, get one of those things you stick in your ear and you can walk around all day and talk all you want without infringing on the lives of the rest of us.

And here’s the thing for speaker phone people: No one can understand you. Did you ever notice you were asked to repeat yourself countless times during every conversation. You sound like you’re talking into a phone that’s inside a lunch bag.

Even worse for the unintended casual observer: A double speaker phone conversation. I’ll take it one further: A double speaker phone conversation when the parties walk away from their phone but still continue to speak. I was a direct, unintended witness to one of these just yesterday. From my place several feet away, it sounded kind of like that first phone call when Alexander Graham Bell rung up Watson in the next room in 1876, but it instead went kind of like this:

Bell: “Mr. Watshshshshsh here want see.”

Watson: “What?”

Bell: “(papers rustling, inaudible speaking)”

Watson: “Get closer to the phone man.”

Bell: “Ok, let me pick shshshshshsh”

Watson: “Please take me off speaker.”