Last week I finally gave in and had the landline at my home repaired. It had been partially working for months, only able to receive calls while being unable to make calls. It had been that way after an internet outage and the modem was replaced many months ago, and although I reported the problem, the process of describing that particular issue was so tedious that I gave up after 2 tries without the issue being resolved.
After all, the primary purpose of a landline these days is only to have internet, so as long as that was working fine, nobody was complaining. There were a few times that not being able to make a call on the landline became a hassle, but with everyone having a mobile phone, it wasn’t that much of a big deal. The only times we really needed a landline was to call toll-free numbers, which doesn’t really happen that much anyway as most customer service centers have also moved to messaging services and chatbots.
The incident that made me try one more time to get my landline’s outgoing call service fixed was when my daughter had to call the admissions office of a Manila university to follow up on her application, as the other methods of contacting were not responding and she needed to talk to a human being. She was home while I was at the office at that time and I remember our interaction when she was asking for help on how to call a landline with a local number to be an amusing one.
What made it a bit more challenging for her was that she was doing it on a mobile phone, where the numeric keypad disappears while in a call. I’m guessing that she first messaged me to ask for assistance when the automated system asked her to enter the local number. She had never encountered such an antiquated system before.
On her next attempt, I think she was told by the voice that the local number was wrong (or busy), so I told her to ask for an operator, which was another new concept for her generation who are used to calling or messaging people directly from their smartphones. I told her to dial 0 or 1 at the prompt to get an operator, which was something that used to be common knowledge among my generation.
And then when she finally gets to be transferred, she messages me, probably while waiting, that she is hearing the ‘hold music’ which I assume is the first time she has ever experienced. The messages I got from her that morning showed the amusing generational/technological gap that she was navigating through, with the help of her old man.
Anyway, long story short is that she finally got to talk to a human being on the other end who was able to sort out her admission test permit problem.
But that wasn’t what made me have to fix our landline. That was just the funny story of the final straw that made me realize we needed our landline fully functional.
What made me chat up our telco tech support to fix the landline was her cellphone load, which was used up by the NDD call. Because apparently prepaid phones don’t do free long distance calls to landlines. If she had done it on our good old fashioned telephone, the call would’ve been free of charge or part of the monthly service fee. Having to top up her prepaid load was what made me follow up the repair of the rarely used telephone unit in our house. In the end, the technician came over and replaced not the telephone, but the modem. All is good now, I can use the landline to make that rare call to another landline again.
It is interesting to see how the telephone has evolved. Although the smartphone has become more ubiquitous than the landline, the telephone ‘app’ is probably among the least ‘app’ among the youth today. They don’t use or need it to call when there are so many other and much better messaging and communication options out there. In my daughter’s case, her prepaid load level is usually at just around P100, just enough to make sure she can make an emergency call or text, which in our experience can last months. What she regularly needs is her data promo, which gives her phone access to everything else that makes it smart.
How much longer before the telephone is rendered extinct by the relentless march of technology? With technology surging along at a breakneck pace, even those who answer the telephone to respond to inquiries might even be replaced by AI, probably within a generation. Although its impending obsolescence makes me feel older, I would like to be hopeful that advances in technology can still be dictated and tempered by humans so it results in a net benefit for our race, especially the generations that come after us.*
