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# The adventure of calling a landline
- URL: https://larrysalibra.com/the-adventure-of-calling-a-landline/
- Published: 2026-08-18T15:28:40.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-18T15:28:40.000Z
- Author: Larry Salibra
- Tags: technology, nostalgia, day-40, daily

I miss the telephone. No, not the smartphone, but the physical landline telephone. With landline telephones, phone numbers were addresses connected to physical spaces and not people. When you dialed your friend's home phone number, you were literally causing a ringing sound inside the physical building that they called home. This happened whether or not your friend was actually in the building or even in the same country. 

You'd never know who would answer a landline and what their relationship was with the person you wanted to speak with. Often it was a parent or other relative. Sometimes, it was a sibling or a friend of a sibling. If you were unlucky, it was a groggy, very unhappy person who had been sleeping until you just woke them up. Other times it was your friend's parent's co-workers' friend who was attending a dinner party and happened to hear the telephone ring as they walked into the house to refresh their martini. Sometimes it was a total stranger like the plumber the family hired to fix the leaky sink.

Once your call was answered, you had to explain to the person answered who you wanted to speak with. This sounds easy, but in practice could be a challenge. People often called my family's home phone asking to speak with Larry. They'd then be asked "with which Larry would you like to speak?" This was usually followed by a confused silence and then a "uhh...the younger one?" 

Trying to reach your friend by calling their home landline frequently turned into an interrogation. Whoever answered would want to know who you were and why you wanted to talk to the person you were asking for. Often this turned into a negotiation over the priority of your call: "I'm sorry, Mary is busy doing her homework right now, can she call you back later?" "But I need to ask her an important question on our group homework project, Mrs. Smith! Can I please talk to her now?"

Landlines often had multiple phones in different rooms connected to the same line. This meant the magic spell of your deep conversation with the love of your middle school life could instantly broken as her mom picked up the phone in the kitchen to tell her that dinner was ready. And what teen of the late 1990s could forget the screeching sound of an analog modem interrupting you and your buddy planning for the Friday night football game as your sibling tried to check their email.

Mobile telephones brought us the certainty of one person, one number and the smartphone brought us control over who calls us, when and where. But from us, they took the away the fun and adventure of calling a landline and wondering who will answer and what hoops will I have to jump through to talk to my friend. And for that, I will never forgive them.