About two months ago, we turned off the home phone service. The picture in the box below is the old phone equipment that used to be around our house. It has been cluttering up my reloading bench all this time. That is OK since I haven’t been home much anyway.

I will let you in on a little secret. It wasn’t a true land line. It was actually a cell phone that had a cable connection to hook up to the old phone line system. We added this line in the late 2000s. This was long before fifth graders had cell phones. The main purpose was provide phone service for baby sitters and later our kids to get ahold of us, if necessary.

In the last couple of years, we go really no calls on the line and it sometimes lead to confusion. Old contacts (like doctor’s offices) would sometimes call and leave messages on the line. We never checked it because 99% of the calls were junk. We would have to weed through satellite TV offers and car warranties on the voicemail every couple of months just to clear it out.

I would have kept the line except for the fact that it was costing $360/year. I was under the impression that it was only costing $10/mo for many years. This is one of those vampire costs that made little sense. My in-laws would call when the kids were young but since they have both died, nobody calls the number.

At one time, I had an extension in the shop. I liked it because I could more easily hear the ringer and see the light than the phone in my pocket. But then again, my wife would not call the line anyway so I would have to listen to the ‘I couldn’t get ahold of you’ speech each time. This was one of the reasons she bought me the smart watch.

In the true spirit of redundancy, I like the idea of having redundant communications. The idea however is that you would have a different provider or a different technology. A landline or a different carrier even is a much more robust strategy for that. Adding another line does very little unless you are using the phone for a specific purpose, like a business.

End Your Programming Routine: I remember the day you would schedule the service and wait for the phone to be hooked up. It was the same era that if you didn’t have a phone book, you lacked fundamental knowledge for navigating the world. I would like to just give away this techno junk if someone wanted it. Unfortunately, it has very little value to anyone. I may give it a try, but most likely it is going to the electronic recycler. It is not worthless, just not practical. That makes me sad.