Our children will never know the pleasure of....

[Dave203]

I hate to take over this topic with too much information on the Dial Tone club but here is another snippet of info. I thought I saw a club like DialTone in a movie or show and couldn't figure out what it was. Well now I know. It was a Charlie's Angels tv show from Feb 14th 1981 Season 5 Episode 10 "Angel on the line" At a club called "The Hot Line Club" where telephones at each table, people call each other looking for dates and someone gets murdered. You can read about it here on IMDB http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0539167/reviews?ref_=m_tt_urv#showAll

It's available for free to watch on my Comcast On Demand
-Dave

[DebbieDoo]

slamming down the receiver!!!!   

Yup...

My thoughts exactly!!!!!

[Dan/Panther]

Our children will never know the pleasure of....

"LIFE"

D/P

[Slal]

Little late in joining in, but fun topic.

Mine would probably use cordless as missile.  Never happened but in order of severity... 

a.) phone into sofa:  "Having a bed day?  Press the 'Off' button please."

b.) phone into a wall: "Put the battery back in and watch your temper."

c.) phone through a window:  "Uh oh... Better call the glass company before Mom gets home."

d.) phone into my 65" plasma TV:  "OK.  *Now* you're in trouble!"

--Bruce

[DebbieDoo]

Little late in joining in, but fun topic.

Mine would probably use cordless as missile.  Never happened but in order of severity... 

a.) phone into sofa:  "Having a bed day?  Press the 'Off' button please."

b.) phone into a wall: "Put the battery back in and watch your temper."

c.) phone through a window:  "Uh oh... Better call the glass company before Mom gets home."

d.) phone into my 65" plasma TV:  "OK.  *Now* you're in trouble!"

--Bruce

It's never too late to join in!!!  My son has thrown his phone across the room and cracked the glass and it still worked but he did accidentally drop a weight on it and now it does not work.   

I love option d.) 

[rp2813]

I'm kind of wondering which direction the handset was actually traveling in the OP photo  . . .

Along with dial tone, I think the busy/re-order signal is something few youngsters are familiar with.  I remember the last time I encountered one (maybe a month ago), it had been so long that I said out loud to myself, "It's busy?  Really?" because reaching a busy signal is fairly uncommon anymore, even between land lines.   Heck, I might have even replaced the handset with more force than usual as a result.

As for slamming the handset down, we all know the act of "hanging up" originally applied to the receiver only, but even after handsets became the norm, the term "hang up" stuck.  "Please hang up and try your call again" is still the tag line on telco out-of-service and mis-dial recordings.  They did switch out "dial" with "try" though, if memory serves me.

How can kids have any clue why we/they use the term "hang up" these days?  They certainly don't visualize a primative receiver's loop being placed back on its hook.   Hey, even I don't, but I'm aware of the term's origins.  Still, with the smart phone crowd, "She hung up on me!" has a much better ring to it, in a manner of speaking, than "She tapped "End" on me!"  It's a foreign conversational term they learned from their parents.

Taking things further, we'd always get a busy signal when somebody's receiver (nobody called it a handset) was "off the hook."  Nobody I knew even had a phone with an actual hook on it, but there you go.  Later we'd say the whole "phone" was off the hook.  Even further from the truth.

As far as today's kids are concerned, "off the hook" only means "really awesome."  Yeah, back in the day when you were trying to reach someone, not so much.