agustina prigoshin

Ulises Orozco needed to call me this morning, but found himself in the dark, technologically.

As cell phone plans become more affordable and loaded with useful features, a lot of people are ditching their home land lines to cut the cost of an extra expense. With a crashed iPhone and no Internet, a land line would’ve come in handy for Ulises, but the house was void of such a vital instrument.

I love how technology is advancing and praise the brilliant individuals who are at the forefront of innovation, but we don’t realize how fragile all these new communication systems still are – with one glitch, we’re thrown back into the Stone Ages wishing we knew how to communicate via smoke signals.

This mornings’ incident made me think of Hurricane Wilma in 2005. I was out of power for about three days and cell phones weren’t working. I remembered that I had a land line for my fax machine and reached under my bed, hoping that what I was looking for was still there. And it was! A clear phone that lit up every time it rang – the pride and joy of my teen years. It looked like this one, but mine was clear, not blue.

I plugged that dinosaur into the wall and heard a dial tone. Music to my ears. Ulises also had a land line so communication was possible. I was sitting in the dark, with a cell phone that served no purpose and a computer whose battery life was dwindling, but I was talking on the phone.

Ulises spent the morning extremely stressed trying to figure out how to reach the outside world. Without a cell phone or internet access, a lot of people find themselves trying to climb up a vertical wall with no help.

This worries me. Any catastrophe like a hurricane can throw us back into a pre-technological world and we wouldn’t remember what to do.

Communication is simple and it should be kept that way. I don’t mean to denote the hard work that high tech inventors have churned up, but the basic telephone has been around since the mid 1800s. And not only is it still around (to a certain extent), but it’s the most reliable form of communication I can think of.

Now, will I call AT&T and hook up a land line in my house, probably not. It’s still an extra expense that I’m not willing to take on, so in the meantime, I’m going to keep a mental note of where all the neighborhood payphones are.