POLL: Do You Have a Landline Phone?

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

I am old enough to remember reading an article in the Sunday New York Times business section about how Pacific Telesis, one of the regional Bell operating companies, was experimenting with new technology. The technology wanted to allow people to receive phone calls on the go no matter where they were and thus not have to be tethered to a location to make or receive calls.

What they were describing in this article were mobile phones. Yes, I remember when we did not have mobile phones. Not even clamshell phones. Not even brick phones. Phones plugged into a wall.

As a recruiter (I stopped doing that years ago), if the phone rang and you are not at your desk, you ran to the phone because if you missed the call, you did not know who had called you to be able to call them back.

Secretaries took messages. Secretaries were usually women. Secretaries were usually yelled at if someone didn’t like the message taken or got the phone number wrong.

It was an era of typewriters, telephone message pads, and White Out (if you don’t know what that was, it was a backspace button on a typewriter except you had to use a gloppy liquid to cover up your original mistake and then type into the dried liquid).