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It was fine.
The Best part of that time was not being expected to be personally available every minute of the day. The phone was a part of your house and not a part of you.
this post was submitted on 08 May 2026
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was not being expected to be personally available every minute of the day
I'm just not and people get used to it. I take some days to answer to texts, often leave my phone where I can't hear it and it kind of works fine. If it's really important, people usually try several times.
I like the DND feature that mutes everything but rings for repeated calls within a certain time frame - that way if it's something important enough, I can get notified the second time around, otherwise I can toss my phone somewhere and not be bothered until I decide to look at it again.
Same here. I check it a couple of times per day but rarely have it on my person all the time. It's usually on mute or vibrate, and I've set most notifications to hidden/silent except for the ones that matter to me.
I will never understand why android removed the ability to easily set notifications per app and per contact. my blackberry and my first android were great for that
now my phone just lives on silent and I'll maybe respond to somebody within a few days
You could pick up a second phone in the house and listen in, whilst not breathing
Some phones, you could unscrew the covers on the microphone and the earpiece. And then you could just take the microphone out, because it wasn't wired in, it was just a loose piece that sat on contacts kind of like AA batteries.
Before caller ID came along, call waiting and three-way calling were a new thing for a while. I had one of the old Mickey mouse phones, and you could unscrew and take out the microphone on that one. So me and a buddy would take the phone book, pick two numbers at random, and then using three-way calling I would call each one of them as quick as I could, and then listen in as two strangers called each other. You got arguments, and accusations, and a couple of times a guy hitting on a girl who had no idea how he got her number etc. blah blah. I was certain I was a prank genius.
Later I started getting a bit more inventive like having two pizza places call each other, etc. But the best one was, in the white pages I found a Mr so and so Junior, and a Mr so and so Senior. I made those two houses call each other, and both houses were full of people, and they got into a big argument over who called who and they kept passing the phone around saying hey let me let you talk to your dad he'll tell you what's up blah blah and we're just sitting there laughing and laughing. That one went on a while.
Caller ID came along pretty soon after that and the fun was over.
Don't do it for too long though because you'll die
Lost my sister this way. RIP Becky.
And your neighbors too, if you had a Party Line.
The prank answers! I miss the prank answers!
"Grapefruit's Mortuary, you stab 'em, we slab 'em. Some go to heaven, some go to hello?"
I usually go with the old tried and true, "Bart's crematorium you kill 'em we gril em"
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In the very early days of the Internet, if your mom's friend called to gossip it meant you had to reset the 5 hour countdown on downloading that single image.
MOMMMMM!!!!
Happy mother's day all
The edging was INSANE back then.
We didn't have call waiting, so for us it was literally just no using the internet before 9pm because you didn't know who might call
For those too young to know, call waiting is standard now your phone tells you when you get a call while on another call, but this used to be a paid upgrade feature and if you didn't have it, the person calling you would get a busy signal (instead of ringing it would just beep) and you had no way to know.
There were some benefits, like when I would skip school and they would call home and leave a message for my dad about it and I would be able to delete the message without him ever knowing about it.
Yep. My parents always appreciated me answering the phone in the evening and telling the "telemarketers" to stop calling, so they didn't have to get up from the couch.
Also, if you made plans there was no reliable way to chase anybody up. So for example on a Friday you'd all agree to meet on Saturday in town by the park at 10am, then four out of the five of you would show up, you'd wait for 5-10 minutes and if Ashley didn't arrive you'd just be like "Well, I guess we'll find out if she's still alive on Monday" and then just go about your day. In theory someone could call her that evening and find out what happened, but usually nobody bothered.
There was also a brief but very confusing crossover period where you could call a friend, her Dad would answer and say she's already on the other phone (meaning a cell phone) so you'd make chit-chat with her Dad for five minutes in case the other call finished, which it usually didn't.
EDIT: Also I don't know if it was the same anywhere else, but where I grew up (UK) some kids tried to call a payphone from a different payphone and reverse the charges so they could chat for free, and the police showed up and told them off lol.
Honestly it was pretty horrible when I think about it. Both my parents were very active in sports clubs and had jobs that involved getting a lot of calls at home. I had to answer the phone several times a day, yell, take notes when my parents weren't home and wasn't allowed to be on the phone for "too long" because someone else could call.
When it was a telemarketer, we'd say "just a moment" and then sit the phone in front of the TV speaker. You'd hear little buzzy "hello? hello?" punctuating Jerry and George's coffee shop banter. It was funny. Other times my friends would make sex noises in the background. Also funny.
Another fun one was answering the phone with a question like "is Becky there?" This would always throw them off. Can't do any of this nowadays because now they just note that your number is an active one and sell it to data brokers (which is why I will never have "read receipts" activated on my phone)
I the early days of the computer phone scammers (the ones that pretend to be from Microsoft and try to get your IP address or whatever) my friend's Mum would say "Hold on, I'll turn on the computer" and then put the phone down, go do something, and if they were still there later she'd say "Almost there, it's very slow." and repeat until she got bored and then tell them she didn't have a computer. One time she had a guy on for almost an hour apparently lol.
The aggressive thing was not covering the receiver when yelling at your brother, who wasn't even home "it's your gf, you in?" Wait a few seconds then yell "no, the one with the big ears" and a few seconds later inform the poor girl on the phone that your brother wasn't available.
Not covered in this image: having to learn how to be more discreet in your tweens and teens. You told your dad's boss that dad "couldn't come to the phone right now" and took a message, not that he was dropping a hot deuce and had run out of toilet paper.
A shared family phone line was basically social roulette. You never knew if you were answering for gossip, business, or pure disaster.
How terrible, learning social skills for talking to a diversity of people and contexts.
The world was different when you had to walk the streets and have random encounters with others.
Shaniqua don’t live here no more…
One person who was expecting a call. And their sibling running to answer it first just to be a dick.
I mean, caller ID has been a thing for a while. I remember when I was a kid in the 90s knowing which phone numbers I could answer, like my grandma, and the ones I didn’t know were to go to “the machine”. (Answering machine is what we used to call voice mail.)
It was a separate box even, so on the end table we had the cordless phone with the giant antenna that would get staticky when I used my RC cars, the tiny box with a tiny screen that showed the number calling, and a separate answering machine.
I remember later when we upgraded to a cordless phone that had multiple receivers each with built in caller id and the base station had built in voice mail… and then we never used it because we all had cell phones by then.
No one in my family had caller ID in the 90’s because it cost extra.
Caller ID wasn't super widespread in the UK until the 00s IIRC
I definitely remember dialling 1471 to figure out who just rang in the 00s anyway (BT equivalent of *69 in America)
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Normal 20 years ago is considered chaos today.
bruh. The iPhone 20 year anniversary is next January.
Or maybe you hit a 2 instead of a 3.
Home phones were still fairly common when I the iPhone launched. I had two separate house phones at the time. One of them was a Nascar phone shaped like a Nascar car.
Now I'm getting stuck on the realization that "NASCAR car" is not a redundant acronym (like "ATM machine").
I almost just wrote nas car but that didn't read right
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