The landline may be back!

A father asked his daughter to trying calling him using an old landline he had lying around. He then recorded her struggling to dial the number (it was a rotary phone) and to find the earpiece to put to her ear. She couldn’t find either and was amazed when it actually connected.

But I read that the landline could be making a comeback. If it does, it probably won’t have that rotary dial nor the old-fashioned push button and it may have a touch screen. But will still be connected to a wall with a cable which people are welcoming. You see they are fed up of their smartphone screens because they are dangerously addictive. They’ve tried to detox themselves from their smartphones but have found it impossible to stay away from social media. It allows them to multitask, which is not a good thing. They can scroll their social media feeds, answer their WhatsApp messages and make calls, all at the same time. But they’re convinced that having a landline will reduce their screen time because they think that because it’s stuck to a wall in a specific space, it’ll keep them from staring at their phones. But will it?

Shortly before the domestic landline disappeared, it became cordless. But that doesn’t mean what people might think it means. It meant that although the handset was cordless the main unit was still attached to the wall with a cable which means you aren’t really confined to a chair getting a break from your smartphone frying your brain.

But your smartphone is a mobile unit which means that you can use it anywhere, including to the landline attached to a wall in your house. If I have the choice between using the landline or my mobile, I will always choose the landline, especially if it’s to call another landline in the UAE.

I like old fashioned things. Plus calling a local landline from a landline is free and it makes sense to use it if the landline you’re calling doesn’t have a toll free number. But not everyone has a landline. Apparently they went out of fashion when everyone got mobile phones. It didn’t make sense to people to pay for two communication devices, which also makes sense. However, there’s a huge but. When you get an internet connection at home, you are automatically given a landline. Apparently it’s mandatory and included in the price of the monthly internet connection so why not use that landline to make your local calls? But people still don’t and that makes no sense.

Honestly, I’m not a big fan of technology. I hate having to use apps to do stuff when I’d rather do it in person or on a landline. I’d much rather stay with in person banking, for example, rather than go online. I’d much rather pay cash on delivery rather than put in my card details on some payment platform. I hate having to read most things online rather than in a physical magazine. I’m the type of person who would download a document and print it before reading it. If you want to detox from your phone that is the only way to do it.

Yes, technology has its advantages. You can send letters at the click of a button and not wait for the post to deliver it. You can type documents and press the delete key to make corrections instead of using correction fluid which made it very difficult to realign the texts afterwards. You can convert one currency to another just by googling the currency converter. You can check what time it is in another country, again simply by googling.

You can do your research on a subject without having to traipse to a library and look through tons of books using the old fashioned index cards. The hours we spent in the university library looking for an answer were incredibly long and sometimes we couldn’t even locate the answer even though it was there somewhere.

There are lots of retro items that I think should come back but the landline is a must. I no longer want it to be an old-fashioned mode of communication