Phone Follies

My wife bought a new cordless phone for the kitchen recently--one of those cheap, drug-store models. It never worked right, so I finally disconnected it and put it in the closet. I couldn't quite bring myself to throw it away, since it's brand new, so it's now joined our graveyard of obsolete and disfunctional electronics. (I wish I had saved the packaging and receipt, so we could return it.)

Since we need a phone in the kitchen, I hooked up an old rotary model. It worked great, but we missed the convenience of touch-tone dialing. So I rigged up a keypad--from another old phone I had stored away--on the same line, by using one of those two-line adapter doo-dads in the jack. Kind of a Rube Goldberg solution, but it works for now. I may even keep this set-up: the rotary phone has a retro-chic charm, I think. My 11-year-old son says it's "vintage."

I had to show him how the rotary dial works, since he's never used one before. To him, a rotary phone seems as ancient as those hand-cranked and candlestick phones seemed to us as kids.