Pluggers by Rick McKee for December 29, 2019

Man. I’ve never seen a rotary dial that works, in ages!

And party lines were the Facebook of the day.

I saw a documentary once (MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES) where this place in China had a heap of about a million scrapped rotary dials!

I remember even to have a phone in a houseHold was considered a privilege.

From the school of if it ain’t broke why fix it …

My parents had one of those 5-pound, all-metal 1950-ish models that developed a break in the straight (not curly) receiver wire. The Bell Telephone repairman said, “I think it’s time for a new phone”, and replaced it with a snazzy all-plastic model with a curly cord. He told us we could keep the old one, saying it may be worth something one day. I still have it on my desk, next to a Smith-Corona typewriter that would make Mickey Spillane proud. (Neither one of them work.)

Party line, three rings was our house. Mr. Wells, 1/2 mile down towards town, was two rings. Outhouse had lots of spiders. Made for short visits. 22 single-shot rifle, Sears? Roasted rabbit! Too many times…..priming the well pump…..my dog, Rex.

Who still has a rotary phone? My parents are now old enough to be grandparents and we’ve always used a push button phone.

Wanna really blow their minds? Teach ‘em to “dial” by quickly tapping one of the buttons (either will work since they’re both part of the same piece of plastic) on the receiver cradle the number of times for the digits you want to call, leaving a slight pause inbetween each digit (i.e. for the number four, tap the button four times quickly and briefly pausing after that before tapping out the next number). People used to put a small lock that fit into any one of the holes in the dial to prevent unauthorized calls. Tapping out the numbers on the cradle buttons got around that.

I also remember when you didn’t have to turn the dial. You just picked up the phone and polite lady said “number please.”

My maternal grandfather had a party line into the 70’s. It was super annoying because there were 2 ladies that would gab for hours on that line.

Not much worse than texting with a flip phone.777-444-4-44-8

It will still work when a cell phone’s battery is dead!

My rotary dial phone from 1964 still works (plain black model, with a black metal dial so it’s an OLD one), but there came a point when Comcast (Xfinity?) stopped supporting pulse dialing and the phone stopped working for dial out. I saw that someone sells a pulse dial to touch tone converter, but it’s not THAT important to have it work… ;-)

Funny you say that, AGES ago I actually had a job where I made them work. Along with Pay Phones and other Bell System Products. But alas, few will know of which I speak when I use such terms as “Pay Phone” and “Bell System”.

Way back.. you only had to dial 4 numbers.. but our first phone had a crank.. to get the operators attention.

Oh this is too good! I love it!

There was always someone who confused the capital letter o and the o for operator.

kids today are like what the???

A good age quiz: What technology features these three numbers: seventy-eight, forty-five, and thirty-three and a third?

A while back I saw a video showing how all the mechanical switching took place at the central office when a phone number was dialed. My God, what a purely analog and mechanical device!

Pluggers are hipsters.