Accidental Luddite

If you want to call me on the phone, the following things must be true: I must be at home; I need to be in, or close to, my office or my entryway, where my two phones are located; and I cannot already be on the phone with someone else. I am unavailable—quite literally unreachable—if I am in my backyard, taking a walk, getting groceries, shopping for a suit, browsing at a bookstore, eating at a restaurant, sitting in the dentist’s chair, attending church, or going to a movie or a concert. The reason for my apparent elusiveness? I am a proud, almost-exclusive user of landline phone service.

The phones in my office and my entryway are the only phones I use to take or place calls. Judging by my neighbors’ near-constant use of smartphones, even while walking their dogs, I would bet that my house is the only one in my neighborhood that has landline service. I could eventually be one of the last landline diehards in America.

My failure to adopt smartphones and my attachment to landlines is not based on any dislike of talking on the phone. Quite the opposite: a recent statement from AT&T tells me I placed eighty-six calls consisting of a little more than fourteen hundred minutes in that billing period. These figures are likely representative of my typical monthly usage. I like chatting with friends and colleagues. I enjoy “catching up” with people from whom I have not heard in years, and in the old days of “directory assistance,” I enjoyed finding such long-lost people.

The nature of my job also requires that I place frequent calls, sometimes to New York, London, or Hollywood. I am working on a biography of the moviemaker Peter Bogdanovich, for which I have conducted dozens of interviews—all over the phone. A persistent source of amazement for some interviewees is that my state of Ohio is on Eastern Standard Time.

My Luddism is largely accidental. It isn’t that I chose to use a landline out of obstinacy but that I never stopped using it. Landlines fulfill the essential function of phone service: you can talk to people and you can hear people—better, I might add, than any mobile phone, smart or otherwise. The earliest non-landline phones—portable phones and car phones—struck me as smartphones do now: clunky extravagances.

Later, when seemingly the entire population converted to smartphones, I saw that my reliance on landlines had advantages. If a call gets disconnected, or someone can’t hear me, I am never the responsible party; it’s always the person on the other side, invariably a mobile phone user. When I am away, I am truly away. I have never had a ringing phone interrupt a movie. I schedule my calls when I know I will be at home, and those wishing to reach me when I am not will have to wait. When I wrote for my metro daily newspaper, I had an informal agreement with my editor: on deadline day, I told him if I was going to be away from my desk (and thus my phone) for any length of time.

I am not inflexible. In 2019, when I sold my previous house, the real estate agent wished to text me with showing times and other updates. I bought a cheapo flip phone but never used it for anything other than communications related to the house; after I moved, I let the minutes expire. I’ve had mobile phones during other times I’ve briefly needed to be reachable, but I’ve treated them as the exception, not the rule.

It hasn’t always been easy. When the split-rail fence at my new house was installed, a careless worker drove a post through my landline. Not only was my service cut but I had to purchase (you guessed it) a flip phone in order to call AT&T to make the repairs. By and large, though, my life is better because I use my phone to speak rather than text or take pictures, and better still for my choosing when I wish to speak.

The lesson? We can live without far more than we might imagine. Remind me to tell you how I had dial-up internet service until 2009.