Butch and Karen Enter the Modern Age

For the first time in nearly 40 years we are without a land line telephone. Yep, we have entered the modern age. We had our home phone ported over to my cell phone. Why would we do that for Heaven’s sake? It’s a long story, but don’t worry, you can call our regular number 319-362-0761 and all will be right in the world.

This whole thing started when Karen’s employer, the College Community School District, required all their administrators to get a personal cell phone. Previously they had supplied a phone for them so they could be reached at all times of the day or night. It is hard to figure out why a Kindergarten-5th Grade Curriculum Coordinator would need to be contacted at midnight for a burning curriculum question, but there you have it. I guess the record keeping about what the percentage of personal calls on the district’s cell phones was causing some sort of a problem. In future it was supposed to be easier for the district to require its personnel to have a phone of their own and then compensate them with a monthy or yearly stipend.

We had to figure out what we were going to do. We could have tried to get on some sort of family plan. Initial research indicated that this was less than a bargain for us. We like our plan now sort of. We get 500 minutes of anytime calling in a national plan for $39.95 a month. No roaming charges anywhere. There isn’t a current plan as good as the one we have right now but you can get pretty much the same thing with 450 minutes. It looked like it was best to buy the two plans separately. But when I went to actually buy the new plan they had changed their offerings and we could get both phones and 700 minutes for only a little more than the 39.95 I was already paying.

When I was finishing up the paperwork I asked if it was possible to port our home phone number over to my existing cell phone. The technician said we could do that, but when he looked into it he said it was a problem. Our phone company has changed over the years with buyouts and acquisitions. It is now owned by a company based in Minnesota and even though it is an Iowa number, the technician said he was told that he couldn’t get access to it. I thought this sounded a bit fishy so I started to track it down. I called my land line company who said it was no problem. We got on a conference call with US Cellular and they said it would be no problem. It was supposed to be done by the next Wednesday but due to their inatteniveness it took almost a week longer. But we got the job done.

So, my previous cell phone number is no more. If you have it in your address book…

DELETE 319-573-4761

It has been disconnected.

Karen and I got our first telephone when we were living in my folks’ basement right after we got married. We didn’t want people to call us on my folks’ number so we got a private line. This worked fine and we took the phone with us to several of the places that we lived. After going to England in 1971 we moved out into the country in a different phone district, the South Slope Cooperative Telephone Company. We got a different number then and we only had it for such a short period of time I don’t even remember what that phone number was. It was terrible. The best we could buy was an eight party line. For people used to a private line it was very hard to get used to. Luckily, when we moved back into town our old number had not been reassigned and we got it back.

In 1987 I went into business. I had the phone number changed over to a business line and that provided me with a Yellow Pages listing. After a while I realized that practically no one ever contacted me by finding my name in the Yellow Pages and it just didn’t seem to be all that valuable an asset to have a business line. I called them to have it revert to a residential line, but they said I was trying to chisel them out of the Yellow Pages listing and they said the only way I could do it was to buy another phone line for a year and then switch the two numbers after that. That sounded pretty nuts to me.

Then I heard that you can import your landline phone number over to your cell phone and that seemed like the answer to the problem. Other than the fiddling around I had to do, it did seem to do the trick.

So now we are leading a somewhat different life. I have to keep the phone with me at all times. I have to remember to put it on the bed stand at night. I have to remember to keep it charged up. One thing I don’t like is when people are talking on a cell phone and they’re driving. Of course, one of the first calls I got was when I had just taken the wheel and was on the road. It drove Karen nuts. We are going to have to develop a protocol for that. So bear with us, we are going to need to do a lot of adapting over the next month or so I think.