Home No.

 2022

Memorial to a dead landline

Life lines and dead lines.

I went to phone my mother on her landline recently and heard only a dead tone.  Since most of the calls received through it were cold callers and scammers, and already in possession of a mobile phone, she decided the house phone was an unnecessary expense.  She had it cut off.  I knew this, but I had failed to connect that decision with the number it was synonymous with.  Hence my unwitting call.

I was one of the last genuine callers to that number.  I’ll miss it, but not forget it, 64670.  It is a sequence etched into my memory.  I have known it for most of my life.  It was our first and only home number.  I don’t have a mobile phone so I always used that number.  

I remember the day the phone was installed.  It was a big deal because we were quite late in getting one.  I asked a school friend to phone me.  He did and I didn’t have much to say to him.  Not through that medium, at least.  So immediately began my lifelong aversion to phone conversations. 

However, it became a lifeline, as so may home numbers did.  Relied upon for any contingency.  Wherever I was, I always knew I could depend on that number to reach home, contact my family.  It was the shared family number, like most households.  I didn’t know who would answer, but I always knew it was someone who cared.  The blood network.  Upon answering I knew someone was in the familiar surroundings of our house, our hall, a safe space.  As time passed the number grew with the addition of area codes to accommodate increasing populations of phone users.  The 028 and the 302 were geographical coordinates common to the community, but the five digit core remained foundational, it was ours alone. Now the family number is gone, replaced by personal mobile numbers.   Even the homeless can have mobile phones.  I’ve seen Big Issue sellers on mobiles.  

Many people cannot recall their own number.  That memory is delegated to the device. Memorising phone numbers is a thing of the past.  Yet these numbers remain uniquely ascribed to individuals, a lifelong biometric. While Number 6 decries in The Prisoner that he, ‘will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.  Alas, numbered is what we have all become.  Prisoners in the network.   Is it any wonder Americans refer to their mobile phones as cells.  ‘My life is my own’ adds Number 6, but our lives are no longer our own, free from Number 1, Patrick McGoohan’s Big Brother. With mobile phones we can be reached almost anywhere at any time.  Nor are we ever alone with our devices always listening.  The definitions of privacy and isolation have been rewritten to accommodate this permanent state of invasiveness. We are not on the network, we are the network.

I will not succumb.  I refuse to participate.  You can reach me on the anachronistic family line.  It’ll be a trip down memory lane.

Whats your number?