It's a Wireless Life

Some couple of years ago my wife and I made the move to the cellular house hold status. We just up and cut the umbilical cord of telephone servitude and that was that. Or so we thought. Admittedly, "a couple of years" in terms of cell phone technology is a generational difference; but at the time we lived in a low lying area and had spotty coverage at best... In fact there were a good many phone conversations held in the rain on the porch because that was the only sweet spot with cellular reception.

But that did not deter us. Nope, the end result and the final reason that we got a land line again and have kept it wasn't the old and antiquated but rather the new and fanadangled. We switched to DISH network and needed the telephone to communicate with the servers. Ha! go figure... a satellite system that requires a phone line to work. Well, things could have changed since those archaic days 2 years ago...

When we bought our house we brought the DISH with us and the phone line as well. Some months later when I was getting ready to make an extended off site business trip, I made the decision to get an alarm system for my wife's protection as well as both of our mental well being. I did a lot of looking at the big names and in my opinion BRINKS is the best company to deal with. If you would like to talk alarm systems, email me and I'll even give you my personal referral number (for all that will do for you). Come to find out, in order to have an alarm, you have to have a phone. Yes, it can be a cellular phone if you choose to buy the (then) $500 optional cellular system, but that just seemed silly and hey, we were already sporting a landline for the Dish, so why not use it for the alarm too? I mean, it's not as if we ever used our home phone... we both had cellular phones, right?

Apparently that umbilical cord is pretty important after all.

After an unpleasant experience with DISH we got rid of them and went back to Comcast Cable, who generously offered to buy our dish back in exchange for a guaranteed low rate for 18 months that offered more channels and digital service. Amazingly enough, all the cable processing actually happens through the cable lines... no phone cord needed (this hasn't always been true; it used to be that if you wanted to order a movie you had to call a phone number and give them your box ID number, which later progressed to pushing a button on your remote where-upon your cable box made the phone call using your phone line, to today's two-way communication through the 75 ohm coaxial cable that enters your house.)
However, who can have cable in this day and age without TIVO? And Tivo also uses the phone line to update their menus, messages, and software. You can buy some attachments that let you do this through the cable system, but there again, we have the phone line, so why?

Yup, the more we tried to stray away from the phone-line based household the more we got sucked back into it.

So as of yesterday, September 21, 2005 at 12:01pm, we gave up trying to cut the umbilical cord and instead amputated the cell phones! It's true! And looking over our Cell phone bills, I don't really feel that bad about the loss. Nine minutes out of every Ten minutes spent on our cell phones were spent talking to each other. The truth is that we can talk to each other through land lines just as easily as we can with cell phones and we don't have to pay an extra C-note every month to do so. I can think of a half dozen times a week where I need a cell phone... but is that worth the cost of the service versus the inconvenience of just waiting the extra 15 minutes or an hour that it takes to be able to make that phone call on a land line?

Seriously, by the end of one year of having no cell phones we'll have saved the equivalent of an entire house payment, or 2-1/2 car payments, or the airfare plus hotel costs of our New Orleans vacation from last year, or one quarter of our maximum yearly individual Roth IRA donation limits, or just about any of a hundred better uses than being able to be reached absolutely anywhere/anytime.

It's kinda liberating... and kinda scary. I think I need a coffee.

:j