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You must not be that old. Telephones best feature was it put everyone on an equal footing. Anyone could call anyone else. The government levied a fee on all

You must not be that old. Telephones best feature was it put everyone on an equal footing. Anyone could call anyone else. The government levied a fee on all phones to make sure that everyone would have equal access to them. And we do. It's why it worked so well for so long. It stopped working well, when we added caller ID, and blocking. If you want to block someone it should be hard, and you should have a reason beyond being annoyed. We're becoming into a selfish society who are turning against each other. When we need to start turning towards each other and remembering the golden rule.

Johnny555 9y ago
I'm old enough to remember running into the house from outside to pick up the phone before it stopped ringing, then having no idea who it was when I just missed the phone (since we had no answering machine or caller ID). That was not a feature that I would call "working well". But now I have at least 5 ways to contact me that don't involve making my phone ring and interrupting whatever I'm doing to look at the phone and see if it's someone important enough to stop what I'm doing to talk to them. There are very few people that I actually want to receive calls from and I almost never answer the phone.
MiddleEndian 9y ago
I'm 28 which is not that old admittedly, although perhaps older than the median startup employee. By the time I was fourteen I stopped answering my home phone because it was just telemarketers and I was fortunate enough to be an early cell phone user ( and mostly communicated with my friends via AIM). I am not turning towards anyone. I want to choose who can contact me and when, because I like being able to sleep and do things without interruption. The fact that phone numbers can be hidden or falsified when initiating contact with me makes phone calls rather broken and is the main reason I haven't investigated an AdBlockPlus style phone filtering app to preemptively block telemarketers. It is not selfish to want to live peacefully, it is selfish to demand the right to interrupt me.
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Johnny555 9y ago

I'm old enough to remember running into the house from outside to pick up the phone before it stopped ringing, then having no idea who it was when I just missed the phone (since we had no answering machine or caller ID). That was not a feature that I would call "working well". But now I have at least 5 ways to contact me that don't involve making my phone ring and interrupting whatever I'm doing to look at the phone and see if it's someone important enough to stop what I'm doing to talk to them. There are very few people that I actually want to receive calls from and I almost never answer the phone.

MiddleEndian 9y ago

I'm 28 which is not that old admittedly, although perhaps older than the median startup employee. By the time I was fourteen I stopped answering my home phone because it was just telemarketers and I was fortunate enough to be an early cell phone user ( and mostly communicated with my friends via AIM). I am not turning towards anyone. I want to choose who can contact me and when, because I like being able to sleep and do things without interruption. The fact that phone numbers can be hidden or falsified when initiating contact with me makes phone calls rather broken and is the main reason I haven't investigated an AdBlockPlus style phone filtering app to preemptively block telemarketers. It is not selfish to want to live peacefully, it is selfish to demand the right to interrupt me.

deleted 9y ago
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