Tag Archives: telephones

The Future

Leave Your Message After The Beep

49 Comments

I have things neatly arranged so an e-mail is generated whenever a call comes in to the phone at home.

I realize that may sound strange and other-worldly, so for any millennials who might be reading this, I’ll explain:

A “home phone” is a telephone that stays in the house.  Odd, I know.

This comes in handy for people like me who happen to know a lot of other people who were born in the previous century.  This population still believes calling “home” is the best way to reach someone.  Should one of these troglodytes leave a message, I’ll be able to read it within moments.

That is seldom the case these days.  And yesterday, a very 21st century thing happened.


Machine_Message

 

That’s right.  If you read between the lines, you can see that a machine called my machine and left a message.

That message was sent by the machine on the desk at home to the machine in my pocket.  The message?
Press 3 to tell the machine not to call my machine anymore.

I listened to the message and I can confirm that’s what happened.  Unfortunately, when I heard the message, it was too late to press 3 to do anything, because the machine that called was no longer listening.

Too bad.  I regret the missed opportunity that could have led to fewer machine-generated calls in the future.

I think what I need is a machine that can respond quickly by pressing 3 when it matters most.  Then I wouldn’t have to know anything had happened.

Twenty years from now, how will messages reach you?  

 

 

 

Travel

Extrovert Airlines

43 Comments

Everyone is feeling cheerful about the news that the F.C.C. will consider allowing cellphone use on flights.

Well OK, not everyone is cheerful. But many of the people speaking up seem to be happy about it. And the problem is – they’re so loud, it’s hard to know what the quiet types think. I suspect that in this age of marriage equality and marijuana legalization, the decision will go in the permission-giving direction, and people who see air travel as an opportunity to read and/or sleep are going to have to learn to live with it. Either they will learn to sit near the engine where no one can hear anything anyway, find a comfortable pair of earplugs, or resign themselves to serving time for Seat Mate Murder – a new category of homicide that will exist as soon as people discover a handy weapon to carry it out. How drunk does someone have to be before you can you smother them with a Delta Snack Mix bag?

Plane_phone

Perhaps the best solution would be to segregate air travel by personality type, putting all the loud, verbal people on one flight and all the quiet non-engagers on another. The crew might also be assigned based on social inclination, so Extrovert Air captains would be on the intercom pretty much constantly, blathering on about wind direction and travel time while the Introvert Air flights would sit on the tarmac, their pilots quietly fuming over the way those gabby ExAir crews chat up the tower.

Until we sort this all out, everyone could benefit from learning how to de-code a one-sided conversation, because we’ll be hearing a lot of them. I recommend lots of Bob Newhart videos.

http://youtu.be/QGV1dTGr19c

When have you overheard something alarming?