[Moontanman]

Originally Posted by Buffy

Well, the PETA folks--or the black helicopters from the HSA--will be at your door in the morning now...

Oh that's very different,
Buffy

Oh my god! they are circling the house now, four no five helicopters! Please have mercy, I only got one letter wrong, please... my spell checker was only off by one stinking letter! They're getting lower, oh no, they are colliding with each other, oh dear god what a horrible carnage! Nothing left but a huge pile of flames and smoking rotors.... Humpf.... they must not have been black helicopters, maybe all they could get tonight was the gray training helicopters.....

[Buffy]

Don't worry, the HSA can only afford the Keystone Cops these days...

Oh the humanity,
Buffy

[sanctus]

Ok, freez you are right option 1 or 2, but what is exactly a land line and what is the difference between local and long distance? I thought it was just a normal (=no mobile) phone, but then I don't get what a local normal phone would be...

As for your easy trick, the problem is not that I'm reachable all the times properly speaking, but that if I have a mobile, people expect me to be reachable all time... for example someone knows I'm traveling by train to somewhere and hence they know I hear the phone (or see the missed call in the following hour) and hence they expect me to answer.
I have exactly this attitude, every time I call someone on a mobile and he/she doesn't reply I get upset because I say "you have a mobile so you have to be reachable, so why the (...) don't you answer".

[Becca]

i know what you mean Sanctus, it's hard not to get annoyed when people don't answer their mobiles because you know that they're almost always in their pockets. i don't mind being contactable at all time of the day and night because nobody really calls me. honestly most of my calls are for my boyfriend because he is one of those annoying people who don't answer their phones. GGRRRRRRRR.

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by sanctus

Ok, freez you are right option 1 or 2, but what is exactly a land line and what is the difference between local and long distance?

Okay, I should explain... a "land line" is a traditional phone line that runs a thin copper connection to a Central Office (aka Telephone Exchange)that then switches your connection to reach a given destination.

You would not be familiar with "local" and "long distance" because you live in such a tiny country, but everyone in the US knows what this means: once automated phone switches first went in, it became cheap to get from one phone to another within a city, but for a long time "long distance"--to another city or state--still required an operator. Ma Bell came up with a two tier pricing structure for these calls, and even when long distance was automated with area codes, they kept the (very steep) price differential. With the breakup of (the now nearly reconstituted) AT&T, long distance services were forced to be unbundled, so you could get just local service from your local provider but buy long distance from someone else. That meant you could get your phone with "Local Only" service (which means you don't have a long distance "plan" but will pay your local providers most exorbitant rate if you're dumb enough to make a long distance call on that phone), and that's what Option 2 is...

Originally Posted by sanctus

I have exactly this attitude, every time I call someone on a mobile and he/she doesn't reply I get upset because I say "you have a mobile so you have to be reachable, so why the (...) don't you answer".

Well I guess you should because it usually means that I'm out with my *other* boyfriend...

Women with money and women in power are two uncomfortable ideas in our society,
Buffy

[Southtown]

I've got dsl but the phone company let me ditch phone service and keep the net as long as I upgraded to "commercial" speed (1.5Mb) Well, twist my arm. We got a phone line back later though in a bundle with sat tv. The wife's kinda fickle. Just leave my net alone!

So we have local and LD, but mobile reception in the moutains is too hard to get. We still have old ass cell-phones with extendable antennas.

[DougF]

Buffy
Women with money and women in power are two uncomfortable ideas in our society,

What relay scares me is Woman with Money and Power.
(I just fill so used)


and you know I won't call you when your out with my *other* boyfriend...

[Eye Sky]

Land line comes in handy, when we had the NY black out, cells weren't working. Also when time warner cable goes out, and interferes with VOIP, no service for 12 days till technician came out. For everything the cell phones.

[nkt]

There isn't an option for "I really would like a landline, please!"

I've got DSL over a phone(land)line, which is pretty much the norm in the UK. We use various VOIP systems to terminate calls here, but, VOIP is sub-optimal. Call quality gets affected, and calls get dropped, when people phone at the wrong time. Screensavers and password prompts mean missed calls occasionally, too. And at night? Well, you've got to have the PC on to get a phone call in, so it has to stay on, running up the power bills far more than a simple, easy to handle, instant to get to old fashioned landline phone.

The line is my mothers, but because we live in the stix, there aren't enough wire pairs left for us to get our own line installed. It took us 2 years to get the DSL running! My parents use the DSL via two wireless systems that come to us here. All very neat when it works properly.

We are toying with the idea of getting one of the mobile internet (no number, just data) USB thumbs for back-up for when the landline or DSL dies, and for when out and about on the laptop. About £15 a month gets you pretty much unlimited bandwidth via the mobile phone towers.

Oh, and between us, we've probably got enough mobiles to open a shop!