Nik and I got to talking yesterday after she heard about my “These cordless phones are the last straw in a long war versus landline telephone service” micro-rant yesterday. She expressed a significant degree of skepticism as to the wisdom of such a drastic measure and the crux of her argument hinged on the execution of an emergency telephone call.
Her point goes something like this: In the case of a situation where 911 needs to be contacted (not a situation one hopes to be involved in, sure, but one whose development should rationally be prepared for), she doesn’t find the prospect of having to cope with the—shall we say—quirks of cellular phone service one that she cares to inject into the scenario. Her case study was one in which she recently tried to call her father and was forced to stand outside on the patio in order to acquire enough signal strength to make the call.
I understand the concerns there. Movies that have been made since the proliferation of cell phones have had a field day with circumstances where cell phones have been written out of the script with a simple shot of the phone’s screen displaying the dread “No Signal” message. And we accept this as movie-watchers because we’ve all had enough experience with unresponsive mobile phones to believe that these types of devices can be, at times, unreliable.
My counterpoint though is that as often as the cell service has dropped to heighten tension in movies, we’ve seen as many and I’m wagering even more celluloid-based situations unfold where landlines are disrupted in myriad ways: Broken phone receivers, cut main lines running into the house, cordless phones that run out of batteries or must be taken beyond the range of the handset, etc. My point being that all telephones are subject to inopportune failure—cell phones are hardly the reliability exception and that isn’t just my general loathing of the technology speaking.
In fact, on the contrary, should one enter willingly into a circumstance where the cell phone is the only means of voice-based communication, I imagine that the phone then becomes a vital—even more so than it might otherwise be—part of one’s personal belongings. They would become like keys: You can’t do much without your keys so by and large people figure out a way to have access to their keys at all or most points in time. From an emergency standpoint, that suggests that one might actually be in a better position to have access to 911 or other emergency numbers if one’s only means of accessing them were through a device designed to be carried on your person.
That doesn’t exactly change the fact that cell phones do have an extra wrinkle of worry: Your average reception reliability percentage is greater with a landline, but that’s why I haven’t yet entirely given up on them as a viable method of communication. But with the proliferation of cellular phones and service both as a popular consumer purchase and a business opportunity, I can’t imagine that it would not be in someone‘s best interest to try and make the service better. Constantly, I would think. In fact, isn’t that the thrust of the ever-annoying Verizon ad campaign? “Can you hear me now?” The allusion there is that the company is tirelessly working to ensure that there is quality reception in as many specific locations as possible. This is good for business, and it means that in theory at least, it will eventually be good for consumers who need to be able to rely on their phones in lieu of hardwired devices.
When it comes to wires running into my home, I’d actually prefer to use the Internet to handle my communications anyway. But you already knew that.
