Telephony Protocols

When I was a kid living in New Brunswick, we lived in a farmhouse in the country and had a party line. This meant a number of households shared a single telephone line, and each household had its own designated ring so you knew when a call was for you. 

If you picked up the phone to make a call, you had no way of knowing whether or not someone else was already using the line, or how long they might be using it for. There was always the risk of picking up the handset and accidentally hearing a personal conversation that was absolutely none of your business, or the possibility of someone listening in to yours.

The phone also had a rotary dial, something fairly common well into my teenage years, as I recall, although most homes had at least one newfangled "push-button" phone.

When we moved to Leduc, we initially had a single phone on the wall in the kitchen, and then extension lines with the same number pulled to my parent's bedroom and to Dad's desk in the basement. When I was a teen, and Tara and I were both using the telephone more, he got us our own phone line with a different number, which felt tremendously important.

When I got a little bit older this separate line meant I could use my TRS-80 Colour Computer and 300 baud modem to explore the earliest online communities - bulletin board systems (BBS) and message boards and the like.

In college I got a retro candlestick phone (I have no idea where from) which looked marvelous, but made two-handed phone conversations kind of mandatory, and doing anything else while talking almost impossible. College was also where a colleague showed me the first cordless phone in the hands of a peer, an incredibly stylish little folding handset that flipped open like the communicators on Star Trek.

I was late to getting a mobile phone, and it would have been longer had I not required one for work, I think in 2005 or so. When I left that job in 2007, I was already so acclimatized to having one I got a basic pay-as-you-go device, and one later for Audrey.

Later on there came smart phones, but I didn't bother with a mobile date plan until, again, it became a work requirement in 2016 (and a perk, as they paid for it too). When my job changed in 2020, I found the data too hard to give up, so again I got a basic plan. With so many places having data, I don't usually go over the 1GB per month I pay for, but when travelling, it does happen.

Now everyone has a phone, almost everywhere we go, and it feels unnerving to be out of touch even for a little while. Audrey and I drove to Toronto from Edmonton in 1995, calling our folks from motel phones along the way on most days. This year in driving to Flin Flon on our way to Churchill, being out of service on Hansen Lakes Road felt unfamiliar and disturbing.

Many younger people don't like phone calls out of the blue, preferring a text asking for permission. I rarely talk for long periods on the phone, preferring a video chat on any number of platforms on my phone, tablet or PC. Unfamiliar numbers go straight to voicemail.

It occurred to me the other day that kids answering a household phone has probably been a thing of the past for a while now, at least in the majority of homes. What child growing up today will ever have cause to place their hand over the receiver of a shared communications device and bellow, "MOM! DAD! PHONE FOR YOU!"? This would probably seem completely peculiar to the young folks watching Winona Ryder pick up her kitchen handset with the extra-long cord so many of us had and asking "why does her phone have a tail?"

I mentioned this in passing to a coworker who confessed that if a boy called for his older sister while she was indisposed (and presumably a few times when she wasn't) he would inform them, "she can't come to the phone right now, she's taking a dump."

Busy signals, answering machine messages, all things of the past, largely, replaced by interactive voice menus and automated callbacks - but I don't imagine any of us miss being tethered by that curly cord, even the extra-long ones.