Member-only story
Goodbye, Landline. I Won’t Miss You.
Spam and robocalls have made this stalwart communication system unusable
“I called you, but I guess you didn’t hear it,” said my mother.
“This line?” I said, popping my AirPods Pros in my ears.
“No,” she said, sounding a bit concerned (or annoyed).
“Oh, you called the house phone.”
That’s when I realized my landline was unplugged. It wasn’t broken. I’d done this on purpose.
Let’s go back two weeks ago.
My home phone rang, and even though I suspected it was a spam or robocall, I glanced at the caller ID. Seeing a local area code and knowing that there were still a handful of friends, family, and local businesses that still called this number I picked up.
I knew I was in for trouble as soon as I put the handset to my ear. The sound quality was awful. It sounded like the caller was dialing from a busy factory floor.
I offered my best monotone “hello.” The caller told me there was an erroneous $720 charge on my Amazon account and that we’d have to deal with it. It was a phishing call — they hoped to gather personal information like my Amazon information, bank account, credit card details, or even Social Security number. I hung up.
Over the next 45 minutes, the spammers called more than 20 times, each call featured a different local number but an increasingly familiar voice on the other side and the same Amazon charge warning. (A brief Twitter check revealed that I was not alone in dealing with that day’s spam tsunami.)
In desperation, I engaged with the spam caller. I told him I could barely hear him and asked how many people were in the room with him. To my surprise, he responded: “45.” I toyed with him, said I was with the FBI (he laughed and said, “No, you’re not”), and finally begged him to remove our number from the call list. He lied and said he would, and then they proceeded to call us again and again.
That’s when I pulled the plug.
I worried, for a moment, about the people (those calling from 1995) who wouldn't be able to reach us but also quickly realized that 99% of my phone conversations are now on my…
