When we moved into the house, we had a variety of landlines in the place. We splurged and went for one early cordless phone for in the family room. That was about 1995.
When we did the closets in the master bedroom in 2000, pre-Katherine, one of the tasks was to rerun the phone jack from the east wall (where we’d had the bed, and where the new closet was going) over to the west wall. No choice, really. We also ran one down into the garage, to set up a phone there for when we were doing yard work. (That latter one never got a handset installed — it drew too much additional power from the line.)
When we redecorated in the family room in 2001 or so, we had to do more phone line jiggery pokery — add one over in the corner where Margie’s desk would be.
And when we redid the office/guest room upstairs, we ran some special conduit behind the drawers to let a phone line run from over where the jack is (under the printer) to where the office workspace would be (other end of the wall)
During this time, we began to join the world of cordless phones. Ooooooh. We had a first generation cordless, eventually, in the family room. Then around 2003 or so, we decided to be Frightfully Clever. We got a Uniden cordless phone (900 MHz) for the family room — that had a second charging station we could set up another handset (oooooh!) behind the couch, so we could answer the phone without getting up. What hath God wrought?
Over time, we added to our piecemeal collection. Margie traded out her phone at her desk for a stand-alone cordless. We bought another pair of Unidens for the upstairs — same model, but different frequency — so that we could have a cordless in the bedroom (much easier for handing a call over in the middle of the night) and one in the office on the same circuit. Except, of course, that was too far away, so that extra handset went into the craft room, unnecessarily.
We even had one of our older stand-alones in the basement for taking calls during games.
Of course, these had limited interactivity. With the Uniden pairs, only one of the handsets could be active at a time. They all had fairly limited range. We actually tried a few years later some nice 2.4GHz phone — and promptly had to take them back because they frelled up the WiFi.
So, 6 years later or so … annoyed by the kludges, and facing rechargable phones that are beginning to not go long between recharges — we broke down and bought a whole new freaking phone system for the house — a Panasonic KX-TG6440 system at Costco. It comes with five handsets (2-3 of which can be active at a time), it’s all the new spiffy Dect 6.0 wireless standard, it can share phone books between the handsets, it does everything but make the calls for you …
And I realized, as I was installing it this morning, that this leaves us with a whole lot less need for phone jacks in the household,* since the one in the bedroom, the office**, and Margie’s desk will now be unused. When I think of the effort we’ve gone through on that …
Kind of amazing, at least for this old codger.
* Yes, I realize some people have gone all-wireless. We’re not “there” yet; I think we will always have our own land line, for a variety of reasons. Note that we’ll still have a dedicated non-cordless land line connection out of the kitchen, in case the power goes off and the cell batteries wear down.
** The fax machine on the printer still gets hooked into that jack as needed. Though we have to unhook it because it has an unfortunate tendency to suddenly “pick up” in the middle of phone calls, even though we have sternly told it not to.
When I moved to washington, I decided to get a cell phone. I saw no need to pay for a land line as well. Four years later, I signed up for phone service through Comcast to get a promotional deal that will keep my cable/Internet rates down for another year.
The first few weeks, all I got were robocalls from bill collectors trying to reach the previous owner of the number, including Comcast (who should have known better, as they reassigned the number). Now the calls are all from companies offering to get me out of debt. 😛
I replaced my old phone with a two-unit ATT phone, so I can hear/answer the phone when I am upstairs or downstairs. It’s convenient, as I often forget to carry me cell phone downstairs with me. I rather regret giving my boss my new number, though. 😉
Well, my cell number is on all of my company emails, and about 80% of the calls I get on it tend to be from the office at various times.
I guess it’s old-fashioned of me, but I like the security of having a land line and a mobile line. If something goes wrong with my cell phone (or my cell service), being cut off that way would be irksome. It’s the same reason we keep resisting those same Comcast deals to route our phone through our cable — our cable service goes out often enough that not being able to call Comcast to tell them about it (or only being able to do so from my mobile) would be irritating.
I’m a tech guy — I like the resiliency of redundancy.
As a side note, we kept the same voice mail message, but let Katherine record it this time.
When we moved into the Ann Arbor apartment a year and a half ago we opted not to get a land line at all. At the time we only had my cell phone so we picked up one more for Anne and I added a second number to my service. Courtney opted to get her own cell service separately.
Our reasoning was this: A land line with the options we wanted would cost almost double what adding Anne onto my cell service would cost. As it stood my cellphone usage was minimal, but a requirement for the job I had so dropping the cell and going land line only wasn’t an option. I was with Cingular (now AT&T) which has the minutes rollover policy and I’d managed to use so few minutes that I had something like 10,000 stored up in addition to my monthly quota of 300. Without the land line we’d use the cell more and use up some of those wasted minutes.
So we went cell only. There are times when I miss having a land line, but for the most part it’s been a pretty good experience. It does make you a lot more conscious of carrying your phone with you at all times, but that does give you the convenience of having a phone with you at all times. Oddly enough, thanks to free cell-to-cell calling on the same service and free nights and weekends, we’ve still managed to amass a ridiculous amount of rollover minutes on the order of 6,000 or so. Which is impressive when you consider that they totally cleared out the minutes I had saved up when I changed from solo to a family plan.
Clearly a lot of people do it. If we ever move from here, we may very well with that sort of setup. Meantime …