When I was growing up we didn’t have wireless phones … no cell phones, no cordless phone inside the house, no mobile devices of any sort, well unless you consider that the trash bin had wheels.\u00a0 What we did have was pay phones and emergency call boxes on the telephone polls.\u00a0 My mother taught me to always carry a dime in case I needed help, and I taught my daughter to always carry a quarter in the event of an emergency.<\/p>\n
I remember a night when I was 16, driving in my mother’s gremlin and it started to rain.\u00a0 The spark plug cap leaked and the little red car would stall anytime the road was wet — as it did that night on my way back from the discotheque.\u00a0 I got out my trusty dime and phoned Mom to fire up the station wagon and come fetch me.\u00a0 Mom was a recluse even then and she didn’t always pick up the phone when it rang because she couldn’t face dealing with the outside world.\u00a0 So we had a system.\u00a0 Ring once.\u00a0 And hang up.\u00a0 Then call again.\u00a0 That was the signal that someone we knew was calling.\u00a0 But Mom didn’t always want to talk to one of our friends, so we had another signal.\u00a0 Ring TWICE.\u00a0 And hang up.\u00a0 That was the EMERGENCY signal.\u00a0 Which I used that night from a payphone, stuck in the rain.<\/p>\n
But Mom wasn’t up for talking to anyone that night.\u00a0 And she didn’t answer even the “emergency” signal because she thought it was a bi-polar friend having a breakdown.\u00a0 In honesty, I don’t remember much about that night.\u00a0 I have a vague recollection that I woke a friend’s mother after midnight in tears asking for a ride and she came and brought me back to her house.<\/p>\n
Nowadays Superman would be hard pressed to find a pay phone on any street corner and many people are even giving up their traditional home phones and relying on cell phone for their primary communication.\u00a0 You would think, because of my background in technology that I’d be among the early adopters to the fiber optic grand convergence.\u00a0 But in truth, its still important for my piece of mind to have an old fashion copper wire connection on a corded phone that will work even in a power outage so that if I needed to call for help it was as easy as 1-2-3.\u00a0 I know how my mind works in an emergency, and frankly if I had to FIND my cell phone and remember to SWIPE, SCROLL, LOCATE, PRESS and FIND THE ICON that actually PLACES the call, I may never get connected.\u00a0 Moreover, you don’t actually get connected with 911 services from a cell phone, even with GPS locater turned on.<\/p>\n
“When you call 911 from a cell phone, the call often lands in a regional center. A call-taker in a far-away city or county may answer your call. To get help to you, there are two pieces of information the call-taker needs to know immediately<\/i>:<\/p>\n Different emergency services use different dispatch centers. With the right information, the call-taker will transfer you to the right center.”\n
\n—– Before You Call 911 on a Cell Phone<\/a><\/p>\n
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<\/a>So when I found out that my new fiber optic digital triple play at my home did not use the copper network.\u00a0 I was a bit worried.\u00a0 In truth, my last home had all digital voice as well, but I probably didn’t have the power outage concerns that I do now living in a house that was built circa 1950.\u00a0 On an already over crowded grid with triple digit temperatures for record length runs this summer, power can go out without warning.\u00a0 That coupled with our need to upgrade our breaker box or blow the main fuse if the central air runs for too long, has had my nerves on edge for the last couple of months.<\/p>\n