I feel like a phone company

In my childhood home we had one telephone, located centrally and with a large coiled cord so that the phone could reach 25 feet from the base unit, far enough to reach everywhere in the original house.  It felt like a luxury because we could answer the phone in the hallway then go to the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom, or either bedroom to complete our conversation or hand the phone to the intended call recipient.  I also remember the conversion from Operator handled calls to machine handled.  On the day of the cutover we kept lifting up the handset to hear the dial tone instead of the operator singing out, "Number, please."  Everyone in town must have been doing it because sometimes it took several seconds to get a dial tone.

We also had company on some phone calls.  The standard phone line had four subscribers on it, the idea being that no one could possibly use a telephone more than 25% of the time.  Some lines had as many as 8 subscribers.  A private line was an expensive luxury.

How we would have marveled at our current state of affairs.  For Christmas Carolyn and I gave each other a new phone system with 6 handsets, a digital message recorder, a digital phone book, and a caller ID and announcer.  That's more phones than your typical small business has.  Although it has a base unit, virtually all the actions can be controlled at each handset.  This system replaces a hodge-podge of sets bought and installed at different times.  I don't recall that we were having that much trouble with our old  phones except that when you had two people on the phone the second person couldn't be heard in the conversation.  He could hear like a fly on the wall but not really be a part of the conversation.

We're still learning how to use the system.  With six handsets we have replaced four of our old units and added a phone in the garage and one by my recliner.  Some day I just may be spending more time there.

So now instead of one phone that can reach by cable into every room of the house, we have six phones in almost every room in the house connected by a wireless network.  In addition Carolyn and I each have another totally independent phone in our pocket or purse.