Always on call

When we moved to North Dakota in 1978, there was only one company, a subsidiary of the Bell Telephone Company, that provided telephone service in our town. They, in turn, worked with AT&T subsidiary Western Electric to provide telephones. The phones were leased and a small monthly charge for equipment was included in each bill. We decided that we needed three phones for our home: a wall phone in the kitchen, with a 25’ cord so that we could walk around with the handset, a desk phone for the study, and a small princess phone for our bedroom. When the installer came to hard wire the phones, we had him disable the ringer in the princess phone. We could easily hear the bells in the other phones, but the phone on the headboard of our bed allowed us to answer without getting out of bed. Disabling the ringer made it a bit less jarring to wake to a phone call in the middle of the night.

In 1982, when the courts forced the breakup of the bell companies, Western electric offered the phones in our home for sale. We purchased that baby blue princess phone with a dial and had the cord converted to a plug-in style. The phone still works and we still use the same phone.

For more than 40 years, now, I have slept with a phone next to my head. It doesn’t ring every night. In fact, I don’t even use our home phone number as the first point of contact when I am on call for the LOSS team. I use my cell phone, which also rests on a charger on the headboard of my bed.

Lately my work schedule has been such that I have been volunteering to take call for the team at night. There are many occasions during the day when I am in meetings or other situations where I cannot be interrupted. The LOSS team needs quick response and ignoring phone calls from dispatch is not a good idea. At night, I am able to respond and give my full attention to the situation. I’m not a big fan of having my sleep interrupted and on cold nights, it takes a bit of a push to get out of a warm bed and go out to respond to a call, but it fits my current lifestyle to take my turn of coordinating the team when I am available to take a call. The system is more complex with text messages and other forms of communication, but the point for the purposes of this journal entry is that I have adopted a lifestyle of being available to receive a phone call during the night.

I’ve taught myself to wake up and to be coherent on the phone regardless of the hour. I keep a small notebook and a pen handy so I can write down addresses and other information as needed.

I’ve read about all of the potential health risks to living a constantly connected lifestyle. I know about the necessity to take a break from time to time, and I try to identify times when I can distance myself from my digital lifestyle. I’m pretty good at taking a vacation and when we are out in the camper, I have a cell phone available most of the time, depending on the signal wherever we are, but I am unlikely to receive a call in the middle of the night unless there is a genuine emergency.

It wasn’t that long ago when wilderness travel meant disconnecting from communications. We used to backpack and most of our trips were short, with one or two nights out, but I’ve taken longer trips. We went off into the mountains, with someone knowing our general destination, but without any way of being contacted or any way of contacting others. If an injury had occurred, we would have to deal with it until someone could hike out for help. We didn’t suffer from our lack of communications. These days, however, wilderness travelers often buy or rent satellite communications devices. There are small, hand-held devices that can be charged with small solar cells that will send and receive text messages, provide for a daily check-in, including a GPS position and provide a panic button that allows for calling emergency rescue services from any point on the globe. These devices can be rented for wilderness travel and many outfitters now recommend them for all backcountry trips.

I realize that such devices provide a safety margin and it makes sense to have one if you are the one responsible for guiding a group. But there is also something lost when we are unable to disconnect and know that we are completely dependent upon our own devices and the support of our teammates. The wilderness isn’t quite as wild with a satellite phone tucked in your backpack.

My grandchildren will never know the experience that I had for the first three years of my college education, where the dormitory phone was down the hall and we had no phones in our rooms. I doubt they know what a phone booth is or how to make a call on a coin operated phone. Actually, it’s getting harder and harder to find a coin operated phone. They have public phones in some airports that don’t take coins and require a credit card, but there are far fewer phones in airports these days. I remember when the banks of phones at O’Hare Airport in Chicago could accommodate hundreds of callers.

These days we are simply connected. I can send a text message to my daughter from the device in my pocket right now. She’s in Japan where it is after 9 at night, so if I’m going to do so, I need to do it quickly or my message will arrive when she is sleeping. We’ve even learned how to think in terms of the time zone differences when connecting via our many devices.

So I’ve adjusted to a constantly connected lifestyle and being on call 24/7. I’m not complaining. There are advantages. But I am aware that there are some things that we have lost.

In the meantime, I still have that blue princess phone with a dial. It still works. I bet my grandchildren don’t know how to operate a rotary dial phone, though. I’d better keep it long enough to show them how phones worked in the old days.

Copyright (c) 2019 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!