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A shared family phone line was basically social roulette. You never knew if you were answering for gossip, business, or pure disaster.
this post was submitted on 08 May 2026
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Not covered in this image: having to learn how to be more discreet in your tweens and teens. You told your dad's boss that dad "couldn't come to the phone right now" and took a message, not that he was dropping a hot deuce and had run out of toilet paper.
Shaniqua don’t live here no more…
It was fine.
The Best part of that time was not being expected to be personally available every minute of the day. The phone was a part of your house and not a part of you.
was not being expected to be personally available every minute of the day
I'm just not and people get used to it. I take some days to answer to texts, often leave my phone where I can't hear it and it kind of works fine. If it's really important, people usually try several times.
I like the DND feature that mutes everything but rings for repeated calls within a certain time frame - that way if it's something important enough, I can get notified the second time around, otherwise I can toss my phone somewhere and not be bothered until I decide to look at it again.
some folks never bothered to cover the reciever
Honestly it was pretty horrible when I think about it. Both my parents were very active in sports clubs and had jobs that involved getting a lot of calls at home. I had to answer the phone several times a day, yell, take notes when my parents weren't home and wasn't allowed to be on the phone for "too long" because someone else could call.
The world was different when you had to walk the streets and have random encounters with others.
How terrible, learning social skills for talking to a diversity of people and contexts.
In the very early days of the Internet, if your mom's friend called to gossip it meant you had to reset the 5 hour countdown on downloading that single image.
MOMMMMM!!!!
Happy mother's day all
We didn't have call waiting, so for us it was literally just no using the internet before 9pm because you didn't know who might call
For those too young to know, call waiting is standard now your phone tells you when you get a call while on another call, but this used to be a paid upgrade feature and if you didn't have it, the person calling you would get a busy signal (instead of ringing it would just beep) and you had no way to know.
The edging was INSANE back then.
If you had to yell for everyone else to hear you, you were pretty well off.
There were some benefits, like when I would skip school and they would call home and leave a message for my dad about it and I would be able to delete the message without him ever knowing about it.
Yep. My parents always appreciated me answering the phone in the evening and telling the "telemarketers" to stop calling, so they didn't have to get up from the couch.
The prank answers! I miss the prank answers!
"Grapefruit's Mortuary, you stab 'em, we slab 'em. Some go to heaven, some go to hello?"
I usually go with the old tried and true, "Bart's crematorium you kill 'em we gril em"
I always knew this saying:
you kill 'em we grill 'em
as Bart's Roadside Cafe slogan. Usually seen on plaques in the tourist trap shops in vacation towns.
STOP CALLING HERE!
......
hello?
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You could pick up a second phone in the house and listen in, whilst not breathing
Some phones, you could unscrew the covers on the microphone and the earpiece. And then you could just take the microphone out, because it wasn't wired in, it was just a loose piece that sat on contacts kind of like AA batteries.
Before caller ID came along, call waiting and three-way calling were a new thing for a while. I had one of the old Mickey mouse phones, and you could unscrew and take out the microphone on that one. So me and a buddy would take the phone book, pick two numbers at random, and then using three-way calling I would call each one of them as quick as I could, and then listen in as two strangers called each other. You got arguments, and accusations, and a couple of times a guy hitting on a girl who had no idea how he got her number etc. blah blah. I was certain I was a prank genius.
Later I started getting a bit more inventive like having two pizza places call each other, etc. But the best one was, in the white pages I found a Mr so and so Junior, and a Mr so and so Senior. I made those two houses call each other, and both houses were full of people, and they got into a big argument over who called who and they kept passing the phone around saying hey let me let you talk to your dad he'll tell you what's up blah blah and we're just sitting there laughing and laughing. That one went on a while.
Caller ID came along pretty soon after that and the fun was over.
Don't do it for too long though because you'll die
Lost my sister this way. RIP Becky.
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Normal 20 years ago is considered chaos today.
bruh. The iPhone 20 year anniversary is next January.
Or maybe you hit a 2 instead of a 3.
Home phones were still fairly common when I the iPhone launched. I had two separate house phones at the time. One of them was a Nascar phone shaped like a Nascar car.
Now I'm getting stuck on the realization that "NASCAR car" is not a redundant acronym (like "ATM machine").
I almost just wrote nas car but that didn't read right
You did the right thing. You did the right thing.
Yea, I wasn't going to comment in this thread any further because I felt we had reached a natural end to the convo but then this came across my screen and I just had to share
One person who was expecting a call. And their sibling running to answer it first just to be a dick.
It certainly made you practice your manners if you were talking to the dad of your crush.
True story: As a little kid, my mom taught us to answer the phone as such, "McTubbs residence, Fudgy speaking." I still carry that etiquette to this day.
"Hey Gramps, be a good little sheepshagger and get me Madam Fuckalicious on the horn, will ya?"
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When it was a telemarketer, we'd say "just a moment" and then sit the phone in front of the TV speaker. You'd hear little buzzy "hello? hello?" punctuating Jerry and George's coffee shop banter. It was funny. Other times my friends would make sex noises in the background. Also funny.
Another fun one was answering the phone with a question like "is Becky there?" This would always throw them off. Can't do any of this nowadays because now they just note that your number is an active one and sell it to data brokers (which is why I will never have "read receipts" activated on my phone)
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