My mother texted me MY INTETNET AND PHONE ARE BOTH DOWN to which I redponded IF YOUR PHONE’S DOWN, HOW CAN YOU BE TEXTING ME?
Related
28 Comments
I would assume that she meant her landline telephone. Bill’s caption proves that it is possible to access the Internet using a mobile telephone, but it is certainly not as convenient as using a “real” computer, especially since typing on a tiny touchpad is so error-prone.
@Kilby, I can use my phone to give my real computer Internet access.
@ carlfink – Setting up a mobile VPN for WiFi access is a tall order for a grandmother to accomplish.
Yeah, somehow it didn’t occur to me that she meant her landline was down.
So yes, I deserve the “No, kids are NOT that stupid tag.”
Landline never even crossed my mind . . . WHY would anyone have/pay for both??
Andréa, I’m pretty sure my mother still has an AOL account.
Andréa, I have both, it’s a super-cheap pay-as-you-go cell phone with spotty coverage. I need the reliability of the landline.
If you have an original “real” landline, not a [fake] cable-provided one, you have the advantage of it not going down in a extended power failure, or just about ever; even is someone knocks down the telephone pole (because the telephone cable carried low voltage power and didn’t need to be disconnected for safety).
To be clearer, in the great blackouts of the Northeast U.S. in 1965 and 2003 (where I lived), telephone service remained on throughout the time and territory; in the latter case for 2 weeks (sometimes at full capacity so calls couldn’t go through). The law prohibited (still prohibits?) the phone company from initiating the disconnection of a house with active service; but plenty stealth-fully allowed cable companies to talk customers into switch over, after which the phone company could permanently disconnect their copper life-line.
“A landline doesn’t go out in an internet or power outage, it doesn’t need to be charged, it doesn’t need a battery backup, and it doesn’t leave 911 dispatchers guessing.” – Jim Chilsen
Landline never even crossed my mind . . . WHY would anyone have/pay for both??
I still have a landline. However, I don’t have a cell phone. I know some can’t live without them, but I haven’t really felt the need.
I’m in the same situation as Brian in STL: we have a landline. I’ve never had a cell phone, never felt a need, and only rarely (maybe four times in the last quarter-century) have felt it would have been notably useful, though still not vital (a couple of times when I got locked out the car and a couple of times when I belatedly realized I was going to be very late to someone who was expecting me).
Mrs. Shrug had a dumb cell/flip phone for a few years, rarely used it, and didn’t replace it when it died a year or so ago.
I resisted cell phones longer than a lot of people — but once my kids hit their teens and began wandering about the tri-state area, they became essential.
I, too, resisted ’til we did a rescue transport without a way to contact the other transporters. Got a cell phone the next day. I’m not a phone talker, but it sure is handy as an alarm to remind me of appointments, etc.
I talk on my cell phone maybe twice a week, but it’s very handy to have my email, personal library, weather report, train schedule, atlas, etc. in my pocket all day. Certainly I have no reason to also maintain my landline, which I would then never talk on at all.
Redundant communication methods seem to me often desirable. At work our phones are all on the computers through the same network connection, so you can’t phone or email or instant message the help desk if your network connection fails, and a 911 call would be impossible. But most people have a cell phone anyway and I can even access my work mail (not as easily) from my cell phone.
I had assumed that Bill’s mother was texting because she could not email (no internet) and couldn’t call (the phone was not working even if texting was – maybe the microphone was not working, or calls quickly dropped but text messages got through in the intermittent service) but could still text. But of course a man won’t understand things when his website content depends on there being things he does not understand.
I’ve got both landline and cell, because I’ve had the landline number for twenty years, so it would be a pain for everyone to update their contact information. As well as for the “redundancy” argument, although they HAVE switched the neighborhood over to fiber from copper, so it’s not as good a backup as it was.
@ianosmond … you can port the landline to a cell phone. What I’ve done for a few “virtual” businesses (that no longer have physical addresses) is port the number to an IP phone. For $3 a month or so you can make and receive calls from any location with a network connection.
I dumped my landline after several months (nearly a year, actually) of getting absolutely nothing but robocalls and spam on it. I had both a (real) landline and a cell for a good many years before that – but I’ve now been about two years with just my cell and it works fine. I didn’t want to port my number, because the junk masters had a firm grip on it (and yes, it was on Do Not Call and had been for years (and was refreshed – didn’t slow them down at all)).
I don’t get all that many robocalls anymore and they almost never leave a message.
I was using my landline number at work to access the internet without going thru the District’s server; soon as I retired in 2005, we dropped the landline (w/answering machine) and used our cells exclusively; Hubby had an IT business at the time, which made separate numbers easier on each of us.
Now, it’s robo call after robo call . . . I keep mine on silent and call back any number(s) I recognize. No voicemail, so I don’t have to bother with listening to . . . well, probably nothing.
A pity how something that was supposed to facilitate communication is now facilitating . . . non-communication.
I dropped my landline a couple of years ago when I sold my house. I’d had that number for about 25 years, because I moved it when I moved into the house. It was mostly phone spam… and I wasn’t paying for caller ID, so I got in the habit of checking once a day to kill the messages left by the robocallers too stupid to figure out they didn’t have a live person on the line. (the machine would pick up, and the robocaller would start its spiel right away instead of waiting for the signal to start. So the recording would pick up in the middle, dropping the first couple of sentences because the robocaller played them while the outgoing message was playing, and the recorder wasn’t recording yet.)
We get a lot of presumptive spammers (and “hey, I bet you’re a fax machine, so I’m going to send you a spam fax BZZZZZ…) messages on our landline, but I say “presumptive” because 95% of them hang up without a word when they get the recording (except for the optimistic fax machine). I guess we must get a more intelligent variety of spam robots here; I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
When we replaced our ‘record everything’ answering machine with a ‘voice-activated’ one, the calls were really reduced. UNTIL I retired and was home all day to hear the ringing and hangups, many times a day. Also, the amount of people who came to the door to solicit; no wonder the dogs were nervous wrecks when we came home from work.
Anyway, cell phones and sign on doorbell telling potential solicitors that we didn’t want to buy their beef, ice cream or religion cut down on noisy interruptions.
Not unrelated, I posted this on Facebook this morning:
Official announcement: if there’s ANY possibility you’re ever going to call me, please make sure I already have your phone number: I literally cannot remember the last time I got a phone call from an unfamiliar number that wasn’t spam, so I just don’t answer anymore.
It’s hit-or-miss whether I’ll even listen to a voicemail.
I’m very stingy about giving out my number — “No, A&P, you DON’T need my phone number in order to issue me a discount card” — but in this age of automated telemarketing, I really don’t think that helps much.
Andréa – lots of people, including us, our sisters,their husbands and their children as well as most friends have cell phones and landlines (some of the latter are digital cable co or telephone co and some, like ours, are copper wire).
Why both? I don’t give my cell phone out to anyone except friends and family, unless there is a reason to give them the number (such as our RV dealer’s service dept when work is being done and we are wandering in the small shopping center across the street so they can tell us to come back the RV is finished). We have cheap cell phone plans (and relatively cheap phones) – husband has 100 minutes a month of calls. I don’t need to have anyone calling me while I am out other than those I give my (or husband gives his) cell phone number to.
We have old fashioned copper line phone service at the house. Why not cable or VOIP or such? (Okay, we actually have a Magic Jack also but that is another story.) Well, it works. We had Hurricane Sandy – the copper wire phones worked through and after the storm. We did not have to run and find some place with electricity to recharge the phones. (We have two local communities which have their own electric utilities – one of them went down from the storm, the other did not. In the aftermath of Sandy Mom would go for dinner every night at a place in the community with electricity and recharge her cell phone while she ate – and kept her cell phone off so as to have it to use if needed and none of us could reach her to check on her – I had to convince her to call us every day so we would know she was okay.) Also, in the aftermath of Sandy the cell phone antennas were down. Husband and I have separate cell phone service each from a different one of the largest 4 cell phones companies in the US. Neither of us had cell phone service for some days after Sandy hit. So if we only had cell service – no service. If we had only had cable or VOIP service – we would not have telephone service. Copper wires – we had phone service.
Now as to Bill’s mom – what we did have on our cell phones when we had no phone service was text service. I really don’t understand this. We checked as some years ago my niece, when she was too young to drive, was at a mall with friends when something else (not sure if storm or one of the major outages) happened with the electricity. She tried to call her mom and tell her that they were okay and the mall guards had collected all the teenagers together to make sure they remained same but the cell phone towers were affected then also. She did find that she could text her mom – remembering that we tried the same. So, Bill, your mom may be able to text when she can not make calls with her cell phone.
Shug and Brian in STL – most of the use of our cell phones is texting each other.
I text husband when dinner is ready so I don’t have to schlep up the stairs to tell him. Since he doesn’t use his cell phone as a phone unless he has no other choice or it is an emergency and since our home phone goes to our answering machine and he will assume that I will check who is calling and not pick up the phone if I am home – if I need to talk actually to him when I am downstairs I will text him, tell him I calling the house landline and he should pick up and then do so. He will text me if he gets an online order (rare) so I will come up and do the paperwork.
When we are in stores we will often/generally separate to walk around and for me to make a stop in the ladies room. When we are ready to leave we will text each others to meet up. This alone makes the cell phones worthwhile, having lost each other some decades ago in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum gift shop – a room so small that it cannot be believed that any one could lose each other for 45 minutes – and only find each other as I went outside the shop and stood there looking in until he came past in the store aisle looking for me.
We have had our phone number for just short of 40 years – we did have a different number at first, but it was too similar to a pediatrician’s number and we received wrong number calls at all hours.
As I have mentioned we had problems with wrong number calls long before spam calls came along. Our phone number – was similar – with a 1 digit variance and the digits looked alike to an optician store in a major mall, a TV repair shop, and a Domino’s pizza. Despite having for some years a message talking about our crafts in the answering machine message, we would get messages left for all them. The TV repair shop number now belongs to a doctor – and we will pick it up and tell of the error if we hear something medically serious as they leave a message. The Domino’s was closed as all of the tenants of the building were kicked out for the building to be sold to a large hospital network to be used as medical offices. I called the number afterwards and it was out of service. Don’t know who if anyone has that number now.
We have gone through periods since spam was invented where we received call after calls – one company would call at least 6 or 7 times a day for about a year and half and offer to lower our mortgage rate – but since they called during the day and never left a call back number I have to wonder how one was supposed to get taken in by them as one could not call them back after work. After that disappeared the same voice and message about lowering rates, but for credit card started for about a year, then the mortgage calls returned and then they stopped. We did get one or two of the IRS calls. Latest calls we get are that they have Medicare insurance for us and will also lower the cost of our medications.
Strangest wrong number call (not spam) we received was a woman called and started talking – she was mom and was leaving a message for her son. Mother in law was already dead for a few years and it was definitely not her voice – nor was it my mom’s voice. I picked up the phone and explained that the caller had the wrong number. She insisted she did not and that her son’s voice was the one on the message. She was rather indignant that a strange woman was answering her son’s phone and refused to put him on the phone. I am guessing she figured out her error as when I rudely hung up, she did not call back.
There is also google phone numbers. We did not want to continue to pay for mom’s cable and phone (combined) as she will not be going back home. I was unsure of what to do with the number. My brother in law came up with the duh – why didn’t I think of it – solution. Mom’s phone number was made into a google phone number and now goes to the phone at her assisted living facility so no one has to call everyone she knows and tell them her new number and where she is. Hmmm, I wonder if cousin’s ex-wife’s creditors will keep calling mom – they lived up the street from mom.
I have Google Voice because the family and friends have shifted away from email to texting. I like email better, but you can’t fight the hoard. Sometimes they ask whether text or email would be faster for me, and I tell them it’s all the same. I don’t know I have text until GV sends me a notification email.
Comics I Don't Understand 
I would assume that she meant her landline telephone. Bill’s caption proves that it is possible to access the Internet using a mobile telephone, but it is certainly not as convenient as using a “real” computer, especially since typing on a tiny touchpad is so error-prone.
@Kilby, I can use my phone to give my real computer Internet access.
@ carlfink – Setting up a mobile VPN for WiFi access is a tall order for a grandmother to accomplish.
Yeah, somehow it didn’t occur to me that she meant her landline was down.
So yes, I deserve the “No, kids are NOT that stupid tag.”
Landline never even crossed my mind . . . WHY would anyone have/pay for both??
Andréa, I’m pretty sure my mother still has an AOL account.
Andréa, I have both, it’s a super-cheap pay-as-you-go cell phone with spotty coverage. I need the reliability of the landline.
If you have an original “real” landline, not a [fake] cable-provided one, you have the advantage of it not going down in a extended power failure, or just about ever; even is someone knocks down the telephone pole (because the telephone cable carried low voltage power and didn’t need to be disconnected for safety).
To be clearer, in the great blackouts of the Northeast U.S. in 1965 and 2003 (where I lived), telephone service remained on throughout the time and territory; in the latter case for 2 weeks (sometimes at full capacity so calls couldn’t go through). The law prohibited (still prohibits?) the phone company from initiating the disconnection of a house with active service; but plenty stealth-fully allowed cable companies to talk customers into switch over, after which the phone company could permanently disconnect their copper life-line.
“A landline doesn’t go out in an internet or power outage, it doesn’t need to be charged, it doesn’t need a battery backup, and it doesn’t leave 911 dispatchers guessing.” – Jim Chilsen
Landline never even crossed my mind . . . WHY would anyone have/pay for both??
I still have a landline. However, I don’t have a cell phone. I know some can’t live without them, but I haven’t really felt the need.
I’m in the same situation as Brian in STL: we have a landline. I’ve never had a cell phone, never felt a need, and only rarely (maybe four times in the last quarter-century) have felt it would have been notably useful, though still not vital (a couple of times when I got locked out the car and a couple of times when I belatedly realized I was going to be very late to someone who was expecting me).
Mrs. Shrug had a dumb cell/flip phone for a few years, rarely used it, and didn’t replace it when it died a year or so ago.
I resisted cell phones longer than a lot of people — but once my kids hit their teens and began wandering about the tri-state area, they became essential.
I, too, resisted ’til we did a rescue transport without a way to contact the other transporters. Got a cell phone the next day. I’m not a phone talker, but it sure is handy as an alarm to remind me of appointments, etc.
I talk on my cell phone maybe twice a week, but it’s very handy to have my email, personal library, weather report, train schedule, atlas, etc. in my pocket all day. Certainly I have no reason to also maintain my landline, which I would then never talk on at all.
Redundant communication methods seem to me often desirable. At work our phones are all on the computers through the same network connection, so you can’t phone or email or instant message the help desk if your network connection fails, and a 911 call would be impossible. But most people have a cell phone anyway and I can even access my work mail (not as easily) from my cell phone.
I had assumed that Bill’s mother was texting because she could not email (no internet) and couldn’t call (the phone was not working even if texting was – maybe the microphone was not working, or calls quickly dropped but text messages got through in the intermittent service) but could still text. But of course a man won’t understand things when his website content depends on there being things he does not understand.
I’ve got both landline and cell, because I’ve had the landline number for twenty years, so it would be a pain for everyone to update their contact information. As well as for the “redundancy” argument, although they HAVE switched the neighborhood over to fiber from copper, so it’s not as good a backup as it was.
@ianosmond … you can port the landline to a cell phone. What I’ve done for a few “virtual” businesses (that no longer have physical addresses) is port the number to an IP phone. For $3 a month or so you can make and receive calls from any location with a network connection.
I dumped my landline after several months (nearly a year, actually) of getting absolutely nothing but robocalls and spam on it. I had both a (real) landline and a cell for a good many years before that – but I’ve now been about two years with just my cell and it works fine. I didn’t want to port my number, because the junk masters had a firm grip on it (and yes, it was on Do Not Call and had been for years (and was refreshed – didn’t slow them down at all)).
I don’t get all that many robocalls anymore and they almost never leave a message.
I was using my landline number at work to access the internet without going thru the District’s server; soon as I retired in 2005, we dropped the landline (w/answering machine) and used our cells exclusively; Hubby had an IT business at the time, which made separate numbers easier on each of us.
Now, it’s robo call after robo call . . . I keep mine on silent and call back any number(s) I recognize. No voicemail, so I don’t have to bother with listening to . . . well, probably nothing.
A pity how something that was supposed to facilitate communication is now facilitating . . . non-communication.
I dropped my landline a couple of years ago when I sold my house. I’d had that number for about 25 years, because I moved it when I moved into the house. It was mostly phone spam… and I wasn’t paying for caller ID, so I got in the habit of checking once a day to kill the messages left by the robocallers too stupid to figure out they didn’t have a live person on the line. (the machine would pick up, and the robocaller would start its spiel right away instead of waiting for the signal to start. So the recording would pick up in the middle, dropping the first couple of sentences because the robocaller played them while the outgoing message was playing, and the recorder wasn’t recording yet.)
We get a lot of presumptive spammers (and “hey, I bet you’re a fax machine, so I’m going to send you a spam fax BZZZZZ…) messages on our landline, but I say “presumptive” because 95% of them hang up without a word when they get the recording (except for the optimistic fax machine). I guess we must get a more intelligent variety of spam robots here; I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
When we replaced our ‘record everything’ answering machine with a ‘voice-activated’ one, the calls were really reduced. UNTIL I retired and was home all day to hear the ringing and hangups, many times a day. Also, the amount of people who came to the door to solicit; no wonder the dogs were nervous wrecks when we came home from work.
Anyway, cell phones and sign on doorbell telling potential solicitors that we didn’t want to buy their beef, ice cream or religion cut down on noisy interruptions.
Not unrelated, I posted this on Facebook this morning:
Official announcement: if there’s ANY possibility you’re ever going to call me, please make sure I already have your phone number: I literally cannot remember the last time I got a phone call from an unfamiliar number that wasn’t spam, so I just don’t answer anymore.
It’s hit-or-miss whether I’ll even listen to a voicemail.
I’m very stingy about giving out my number — “No, A&P, you DON’T need my phone number in order to issue me a discount card” — but in this age of automated telemarketing, I really don’t think that helps much.
Andréa – lots of people, including us, our sisters,their husbands and their children as well as most friends have cell phones and landlines (some of the latter are digital cable co or telephone co and some, like ours, are copper wire).
Why both? I don’t give my cell phone out to anyone except friends and family, unless there is a reason to give them the number (such as our RV dealer’s service dept when work is being done and we are wandering in the small shopping center across the street so they can tell us to come back the RV is finished). We have cheap cell phone plans (and relatively cheap phones) – husband has 100 minutes a month of calls. I don’t need to have anyone calling me while I am out other than those I give my (or husband gives his) cell phone number to.
We have old fashioned copper line phone service at the house. Why not cable or VOIP or such? (Okay, we actually have a Magic Jack also but that is another story.) Well, it works. We had Hurricane Sandy – the copper wire phones worked through and after the storm. We did not have to run and find some place with electricity to recharge the phones. (We have two local communities which have their own electric utilities – one of them went down from the storm, the other did not. In the aftermath of Sandy Mom would go for dinner every night at a place in the community with electricity and recharge her cell phone while she ate – and kept her cell phone off so as to have it to use if needed and none of us could reach her to check on her – I had to convince her to call us every day so we would know she was okay.) Also, in the aftermath of Sandy the cell phone antennas were down. Husband and I have separate cell phone service each from a different one of the largest 4 cell phones companies in the US. Neither of us had cell phone service for some days after Sandy hit. So if we only had cell service – no service. If we had only had cable or VOIP service – we would not have telephone service. Copper wires – we had phone service.
Now as to Bill’s mom – what we did have on our cell phones when we had no phone service was text service. I really don’t understand this. We checked as some years ago my niece, when she was too young to drive, was at a mall with friends when something else (not sure if storm or one of the major outages) happened with the electricity. She tried to call her mom and tell her that they were okay and the mall guards had collected all the teenagers together to make sure they remained same but the cell phone towers were affected then also. She did find that she could text her mom – remembering that we tried the same. So, Bill, your mom may be able to text when she can not make calls with her cell phone.
Shug and Brian in STL – most of the use of our cell phones is texting each other.
I text husband when dinner is ready so I don’t have to schlep up the stairs to tell him. Since he doesn’t use his cell phone as a phone unless he has no other choice or it is an emergency and since our home phone goes to our answering machine and he will assume that I will check who is calling and not pick up the phone if I am home – if I need to talk actually to him when I am downstairs I will text him, tell him I calling the house landline and he should pick up and then do so. He will text me if he gets an online order (rare) so I will come up and do the paperwork.
When we are in stores we will often/generally separate to walk around and for me to make a stop in the ladies room. When we are ready to leave we will text each others to meet up. This alone makes the cell phones worthwhile, having lost each other some decades ago in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum gift shop – a room so small that it cannot be believed that any one could lose each other for 45 minutes – and only find each other as I went outside the shop and stood there looking in until he came past in the store aisle looking for me.
We have had our phone number for just short of 40 years – we did have a different number at first, but it was too similar to a pediatrician’s number and we received wrong number calls at all hours.
As I have mentioned we had problems with wrong number calls long before spam calls came along. Our phone number – was similar – with a 1 digit variance and the digits looked alike to an optician store in a major mall, a TV repair shop, and a Domino’s pizza. Despite having for some years a message talking about our crafts in the answering machine message, we would get messages left for all them. The TV repair shop number now belongs to a doctor – and we will pick it up and tell of the error if we hear something medically serious as they leave a message. The Domino’s was closed as all of the tenants of the building were kicked out for the building to be sold to a large hospital network to be used as medical offices. I called the number afterwards and it was out of service. Don’t know who if anyone has that number now.
We have gone through periods since spam was invented where we received call after calls – one company would call at least 6 or 7 times a day for about a year and half and offer to lower our mortgage rate – but since they called during the day and never left a call back number I have to wonder how one was supposed to get taken in by them as one could not call them back after work. After that disappeared the same voice and message about lowering rates, but for credit card started for about a year, then the mortgage calls returned and then they stopped. We did get one or two of the IRS calls. Latest calls we get are that they have Medicare insurance for us and will also lower the cost of our medications.
Strangest wrong number call (not spam) we received was a woman called and started talking – she was mom and was leaving a message for her son. Mother in law was already dead for a few years and it was definitely not her voice – nor was it my mom’s voice. I picked up the phone and explained that the caller had the wrong number. She insisted she did not and that her son’s voice was the one on the message. She was rather indignant that a strange woman was answering her son’s phone and refused to put him on the phone. I am guessing she figured out her error as when I rudely hung up, she did not call back.
There is also google phone numbers. We did not want to continue to pay for mom’s cable and phone (combined) as she will not be going back home. I was unsure of what to do with the number. My brother in law came up with the duh – why didn’t I think of it – solution. Mom’s phone number was made into a google phone number and now goes to the phone at her assisted living facility so no one has to call everyone she knows and tell them her new number and where she is. Hmmm, I wonder if cousin’s ex-wife’s creditors will keep calling mom – they lived up the street from mom.
I have Google Voice because the family and friends have shifted away from email to texting. I like email better, but you can’t fight the hoard. Sometimes they ask whether text or email would be faster for me, and I tell them it’s all the same. I don’t know I have text until GV sends me a notification email.