Casual
Starr, Richard
Casual TOEING THE PARTY LINE I'm no red-diaper baby, but I grew up hearing lots of talk about the party line. This had nothing to do with politics. The party line was the phone line we shared with...
...The well-behaved majority kept their calls brief and to the point...
...But Bell and its smaller rivals underestimated the willingness of people to put up with lousy service in order to save a buck...
...Same thing if you happen to call a military office...
...But that's another rant...
...People basically had two approaches for coping with the party line...
...The more neighbors you shared the line with, the cheaper your rates...
...Try living this way on a daily basis...
...Indeed, there were more than a few provocateurs who enjoyed saying something outrageous whenever they heard the rattle of Miss Brown's dentures...
...It therefore requires that enough subscribers be placed on a line to make them dissatisfied and desirous of a better service...
...Anyone on the party line could listen to anyone else's calls, and often did...
...For the uninitiated, this is how it worked...
...No, I'm sorry...
...Try doing it with a heavy breather listening in...
...That went down to four by the time I was in high school, which was still three too many as far as I was concerned...
...You think you were nervous asking someone out on a first date...
...Sociologists claim not to understand this, but I suspect they overlook the role of the party line...
...This is a recipe for a lifetime of phone paranoia and self-consciousness...
...Smith's heavy breathing or Mr...
...And before this venerable institution finally disappears, it's worth pausing to remember . . . just how hideously awful it was...
...The party line was the phone line we shared with the neighbors—a rapidly dying practice, according to an article in U^.A Today...
...Which is why we're probably more astonished than most people to hear someone with a cell phone freely sharing her intimate conversation with a sidewalk full of strangers...
...Of course, you never actually got a warning from your neighbors...
...As a Bell engineer wrote in 1899, the up-selling strategy "cannot be accomplished unless the service is unsatisfactory...
...But party lines were once a way of life for millions of (mostly rural) Americans...
...The others, like people today who heedlessly forward dirty e-mail jokes to everyone in their company (you know who you are), seemingly cared little for their public reputations...
...Assuming that anything they said might very well end up in the public domain, they led phone lives of impressive decorum...
...If your idea of "community" includes eavesdropping, prying, and unusually authoritative gossip, then you should mourn the passing of the party line...
...they just want to intimidate their entry-level employees into a semblance of politeness...
...Like choosing to beat the dust out of your winter coat with a stick instead of sending it to the cleaners...
...I've always assumed, by the way, that no company actually monitors its calls to ensure proper service...
...when we overhear a private phone conversation it seems not a novelty but a throwback—almost a willful rejection of progress...
...There are apparently only 5,000 of these multi-household phone lines left in the country, and they won't be around much longer...
...This is like saying, Though the abandoned pickup trucks in my neighbor's front yard were unsightly, they helped create valuable habitat for wild rodents...
...Such warnings—how to put this?—can inhibit a frank exchange of views...
...The breach of manners is not what jars us...
...But you had to assume someone was listening all the time...
...Nowadays, if you call, say, your cable company to scream that your TV has flickered out just when Regis was about to ask the $250,000 question, you get put on hold and receive a recorded warning: "All our calls are monitored to ensure proper service...
...When I was a kid in backwater Indiana in the early 1960s, there were probably eight or ten families on our line...
...Instead of hello, you are advised by Private Bailey: "This is not a secure line...
...RICHARD STARR...
...For anyone who has ever lived with a party line, the first private line is one of those milestones of modernity, like indoor plumbing or central heating...
...The USA Today reporter paints a somewhat romantic picture: "Though the lines , lacked privacy," he writes, "they helped build a sense of community...
...At best, you might be put on notice by Mrs...
...It's a little-known fact that the highest rates of violence in America have traditionally been not in the city but in rural areas...
...Jones's tobacco chewing...
...They knew she couldn't utter a reproach without exposing herself as a snoop...
...The party line was a ploy by Ma Bell to make customers unhappy and thus willing to shell out for more expensive private service—to up-sell, as the marketers now say...
Vol. 6 • November 2000 • No. 10
