It certainly made you practice your manners if you were talking to the dad of your crush.

If you wanted to call someone, you first pick up the receiver and listen. You might suddenly be eavesdropping on another person's call, and you might try to convince them to hang up right there in the call.

Teenagers would beg their parents to get them a second line so they could talk to their friends without getting interrupted.

On a more rare occasion, someone might have left the receiver off the hook. When you do that, it would make a terrible racket for a short while, then it would give up. So if you needed the phone, you'd pick up the receiver and nothing would happen. You had to go through the house to each phone and make sure it was hung up.

Telemarketing did ruin it. This was the main reason people bought answering machines, to screen calls. Missing calls wasn't a big deal for most people, it was the telemarketing that drove people to buy answering machines, and then to get caller ID, and the ability to block calls, etc. Telemarketing was a boon for the phone service providers.

If you're anxious about answering your phone it all started with telemarketing.

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.

You could pick up a second phone in the house and listen in, whilst not breathing

Ahhh. Memories.

• Me at 11yr answering phone: “hello? I AM NOT !!!!
• Me at 16yr answering phone: “hello? I AM NOT <dad’s name>!!!!

And:

• Also me: “MOM PHONE FOR YOOOOUUU!!”
• Mom: <normal tone cause she’s in the room near by> “did you ask who it was!?!”
• Me: “who’s calling please? Mom, it’s Debbie!!!!!”

And lastly:

Kids will never get to experience the thrill of talking to your girlfriend about tonight while your little sister gets on the phone in the basement and makes “make out noises” loudly before giggling and hanging up.

Yeah and sometimes, before my voice broke, I would be mistaken for my older sister when her boyfriend called. Which was awkward for everybody involved.

The best was when dad would yell "GET THE PHONE!!!" across the house. I'd pick it up and it would be for him. I'd yell down "IT'S FOR YOU!!!!" He'd' have to run across the house and answer the phone all winded and shit. Good times.

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?"

That's literally how doors work. Someone knocks and it could be your sister's boyfriend or your dad's boss or your best friend or a marketer or a serial-killer.

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 concept of a party line would send a gen z person into a coma.

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.

This was the way

It wasn't that bad

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.

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)

It didn’t ring very often.

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.

This post gave me whiplash. Am I old?

How terrible, learning social skills for talking to a diversity of people and contexts.

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.

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.

The world was different when you had to walk the streets and have random encounters with others.