The Old Coot had phone fun. (Published 08/05/2026 in NY)

 The Old Coot made crank calls.

By Merlin Lessler

I love my cell phone. It makes life easier in so many ways. Even fierce resistors to technology can now be seen scrolling through their devices in public. Ninety-seven per cent of our adult population has a cell phone. It has saved lives and eliminated millions of inconveniences.

But, and there is always a but, we have lost some things in the transition from land lines to cell towers. Like the crank calls kids of my generation made. We’d call strangers and ask them, “Is your refrigerator running?” When they replied that it was, we’d burst into laughter and say, “You better hang up and go catch it.”

If a woman answered, we asked her if she was the lady who did the washing. If she said no, and she always said no, while breaking a gut we’d say, “Why you dirty, filthy thing.”

With cell phones you can’t listen in on a party line like we did in my day, where several households shared the same wire coming down the street. Only one household could use the line at a time. You had to wait your turn, or like we sometimes did, listen in and then break in to claim to have an important call to make or an emergency, and need the line. The only phone snooping we do today is when we hear one side of a conversation from a rude, loudmouth yakking away on his phone in public.

 You can’t slam down your phone when you get mad like you could with an old Bell telephone. If you do, you ‘ll demolish your expensive phone. If your phone battery is dead, or you forget to bring it with you, good luck finding a public phone or someone willing to let you use theirs. Even if you do, you probably won’t know the phone number of the person you want to reach.  You can’t hail a taxi either; you need your phone to catch an Uber. I think the people who miss the landline the most, are the men who sat in a bar in the old days and shouted when the bar phone rang, “I’m not here!” They can’t avoid their wives like that anymore.

You can’t call directory Assistance to get someone’s number anymore. I tried. I got an A/I voice telling me that directory assistance wasn’t available from my location. You also can’t get the satisfaction of making a free long-distance call, which was expensive in the old days, by having the operator place a “person-to-person” call to your house and ask to speak to yourself. When I did it, my mother would say, “Merlin isn’t here.” Then she knew I’d made it to my destination, and it didn’t cost her a dime! I do love my cell phone, but I also miss those things you could do with a land line. I’m sure you can think of many others.