When they came for my typewriter and replaced it with a word processor, I grumbled but said nothing.
When they took away my vinyl LPs and replaced them with CDs, I begrudgingly put my Sinatra albums in storage and bought his discs.
When bookstores began closing, I built more shelves in my home and started my own bookstore.
Now, AT&T wants to take away my landline, and I say enough, already! Keep your hands off Ma Bell.
Her rotary phones were our lifelines — our memories of when you could stay in touch with the world with a phone, a newspaper and Walter Cronkite.
Today, I’m paying AT&T and Verizon nearly $400 a month to stay in touch, and I don’t have a clue of what’s going on.
In case you missed it, AT&T wants out of the old copper wire business that delivers landline access to around 25% of the households in California that still have landlines and a cell phone. It drops to around 15% with landlines only.
With the speed and technology AT&T possesses, you’d think they’d have texted me with the news, but they chose good, old, reliable snail mail to let me know. How’s that for a shot of irony?
It’s asking the California Public Utilities Commission for a release from its obligation to provide landline phone service in a large portion if its service territory in the state. My portion.
If approved, AT&T will give us land liners six months before it cuts the copper wires and we have to move to a private, unregulated carrier to keep our landline. If no alternative voice services are available, it will hang on until there are.
Not so fast, though. I kind of like the government keeping an eye on my phone bills. It keeps an eye on everything else for me.
I still have an old rotary phone I keep at the end of my desk for personal therapy. The number’s University 6-3230.
Whenever I’m feeling down or stressed out, I stick my forefinger in one of the 10 holes — digits 1 through 9, and zero — on the rotary dial, and give her a whirl, cradling the…
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