Phone it in...

You know, we're so accustomed to things like caller ID and phones that go everywhere with us that it's easy to forget that it hasn't always been that way. I don't miss those days, except for one thing... when you're pissed, tapping a little button to end the call isn't nearly as satisfying as slamming the phone into its cradle.

It hasn't been that long ago that a person was tied to the phone with a cord.

When I had my first baby, we didn't have a cordless phone. If the phone rang while I was giving him a bath or doing something at the other end of the house, I either ignored it or grabbed him and took him with me to answer the phone. No answering machine for us, either, although they were in existence by then.

Had our first answering machine in 1989. That was fun. I worked on a snarky message with the Tijuana Brass playing in the background. Getting the words to fit into the time allotted and then stop just as the music came to a crescendo was actually enjoyable, although I'm sure I should have been doing something else at the time. That's my usual operating system... do something when I should be doing something else.

So when I was a teenager, cordless phones and caller ID were years in the future. When one picked up the phone, there was a harsh honking noise instead of the musical dial tone. We had only rotary phones, too.



The blue rotary phone we had in the little tiny living room of our little tiny house was frequently disinfected, though. (Click on that link. Even though it's a digression, I promise it's worth it.)

In 1975, long before I met her, my old friend Donna had a baby girl.
Donna was still in high school when her daughter was born, but she was determined to be a good mother. She loved that little girl with her whole being.

When Anna was old enough to go to school, Donna worked late nights as a radio announcer/DJ  so she could sleep during the day while Anna was in school. That way she could get her ready for school, sleep, pick her up after school and be able to take her to events or to the park or just hang out with her.

She kept a phone in her bedroom and everyone knew not to call during the day. But she left it on so that if the school called or there was some kind of emergency with family, she'd be able to find out and handle things.

This worked very well until the day one of the local dental offices ended up with misprinted business cards. Instead of the phone number of the dentist, two digits were transposed and Donna's number appeared on the cards instead.

At first the few calls she got were easily handled, she just said the caller had the wrong number and gave them the correct one.

But the cards kept being handed out and handed out and handed out from the dentist's office. There was also a mass mailing.
Guess all those things happened before they'd noticed the error.

Apparently the mass mailing was a good investment for the dentist.
Donna's phone was ringing between 15 and 30 times a day while she was trying to sleep after working all night long.

So she called the dental office. The "lady" she talked to was less than helpful. Told Donna that it wasn't HER fault, that there was no way to go through thousands of business cards and fix the 'tiny' error and that she was sure that 'after a while' people would stop calling. And she hung up on her!

So Donna waited a couple weeks, during which the call volume actually increased. She called the office back one afternoon, and got the same person on the phone.

This time, the woman was pissed as hell that Donna had called her.
She acted like the entire situation was Donna's fault and told her, "It's not my fucking problem, stop calling, we have things to do here and don't have time for phone calls from people who are just calling to whine."

And the receptionist hung up again. (Donna's actual words when she was telling me this story were, "She slammed the phone down so hard I'm sure she broke the handset.")

So Donna decided to fix the issue herself.
When her phone began ringing at 7 AM, she started making appointments for the people who called in. She did not answer the phone pretending to be the dental offices, either. She answered, "Hello?" when it rang. No one seemed to notice.

She gave them all the first appointment of the day, whichever day it was.
So there were between 4 and 10 people showing up at 7:30 in the morning, saying they had an appointment.

She said she would have loved to be there in the office while all that was happening.

Her solution worked. She said she worked very hard to keep a professional voice when she was assigned to record the ad the dentist bought from the radio station.

"The business cards we've handed out over the last couple months contained an error. Our actual phone number is 123-4567. Please make a note of it! Thank you for your continued patronage."

Donna passed away several years ago.
I know she'd appreciate being remembered for this episode in history.