Hello, Central!

After I moved the phone from the kitchen to the living room, I decided I hated the cordless model we had. I'm pretty sure I've always hated it. The sound quality of the handset is terrible and the ringer makes the most annoying bleat ever heard by a human ear.

I wanted another, better phone but, frankly, I'm not as jazzed about cordless models as I used to be. If I got a phone with a cord, though, I'd have to teach myself not to walk too far from the base. That could be a trick. I'd also have to learn to put up with the base jumping up at me every time I lifted the receiver. What brain-dead designer thought making the base light as a feather was a good idea, anyway? When did people start to think it was a bad thing for the base to be heavy as a cinder block, so it would stay rooted in one spot?

The more I thought about it, the more dissatisfied I was with virtually every phone we've had since I bought an old rotary phone at a garage sale fifteen years ago and used it as an extension phone. There wasn't anything great about it. It was a basic, beige table phone right out of the 1970's but it worked great. Tim, who was about three years old at the time, watched me plug it in and listen to the dial tone on the receiver, then spin the dial. "Cool!" he said, watching the dial return to zero. There was a pause of about a heartbeat before he asked, "What is it?"

Suddenly, I wanted one.

So I went cruising e-bay to see if there were any for sale. Holey cheese, were there ever. The trouble was not finding a dial phone, the trouble was finding one for less than ten bucks. People have made a hobby out of collecting them. The upside is, those old phones look really cool now!

The one I finally found for our living room table is a Western Electric model 302 from the 1940's. I was amazed that it not only worked right out of the box, but that I could dial out. Our phone service still supports pulse dialing, how quaint. When the new set of cords I've ordered arrives I'll break it all down and give it a thorough cleaning. In the meantime I washed the grubbiness off the handset with warm, soapy water and a couple washcloths. Otherwise, My Darling B wouldn't touch it.

Tim still loves to spin the dial. I showed him how to make the phone ring and he won't stop doing that, either.