Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Goodbye landline

I've been talking about doing this for a long time, but today I finally did it. We no longer have a landline at our home. This isn't the first time we've gone without a landline. A few years after we moved into the house, and during the time when we were saving money to start Punchbowl, we cancelled our home phone number. After we finished construction in the Spring of 2006, I was starting the company from home and doing a lot of business-related phone calls. I didn't want to deal with the risk of dropping calls while I was on the phone. So we got a landline again.

Since then, I now work in an office outside the house, cell phone technology has improved (I rarely drop calls now), and we simply don't really use our home phone. We have lots of other ways we'd rather spend $50/month.

The reality is that the only people who currently call our landline are:
- Jessica's mom
- My brother Joshua
- Occasionally my mom or dad (although more often than not they reach me on my cell)
- Mount Holyoke College or Brandeis University (looking for donations)
- Politicians looking for our vote on various issues (note: don't register as an "independent" if you don't want to get deluged with calls around election time)
- Random marketing firms conducting surveys (yes, it annoys me that they are exempt from the "do not call" list
- The weird carpet cleaning sales guy (no, we still don't have carpets)

One reason I've been hesitant to get rid of the landline was the quick dial to local 911. I've heard that if you call 911 from your cell, there can be a significant delay as the call gets routed to your town. So tonight I programmed the local police department number onto our cell phone favorites. Although it's technically the "non-emergency" line, it's a quick and direct route to the local police department. Good enough for us. We haven't had the need to dial 911 since we've lived in Natick, and I'm hopeful it will stay that way for many years to come.

So, if you want to talk to Jess or I (or both of us), please call our cell phones from now on. If you can't reach one of us, try the other person's cell phone. 99% of the time, as long as we're not sleeping, either Jess are I are near our cell phones. And if we don't answer, that means we're really busy or just avoiding your call.

Goodbye landline. It's been swell.

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