When was the last time you heard a rotary dial phone? Not the ring of it — although the timbre of a real bell is delicious after years of tinny renditions of “Ode to Joy” and “Mexican Hat Dance” on cell phones. No, when was the last time you heard a dial phone dial? That heavy rrrip chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck of solid Lucite, the muted puck puck puck puck puck keeping pace in the earpiece? The Smithsonian has a recording of it, no doubt.
My friend, a compulsive garage-saler, had an old desk phone in her time warp of a playroom. The first time I heard it, my childhood phone number popped instantly into my head. My son “borrowed” that phone (three years ago) and every once in a while, I dial 255-8451 just to feel like nine again.
Since then, we’ve added a few to our collection. I bought a black, wall-mounted phone from Canada for $15 on eBay for the basement. (It comes in handy during storms, when the cordless phone is dead because the electricity is out.) We splurged on a gorgeous old number that belonged to Ben Franklin’s great, great (seven times) grandson and has a separate ringer box the size of toaster oven. You get on that phone and it’s Bogey and Bacall time, baby. The sound of that dial would make my grandmother’s childhood number pop into her head, Vine Maple 6-4902.
You can find dial phones new — sort of. Places like Restoration Hardware and Pottery Barn have heavy, black 40s-style phones with their numbers arranged in a prim circle. These replicas take that old functional silhouette and make it fashionable, an homage to simpler technology.
But they’re not dial phones.
The numbers are press-button and — the big tip-off — there’s a pound sign and a star. After all, how could we get anything done these days without pound and star? You can’t get voicemail. You can’t access your bank account in the middle of the night. You can’t route yourself into the right place to sit on hold for customer service. And what if you needed to dial Q or Z on the company directory? (Ha. Technically you can’t “dial” a press-button phone, but I’m too old to get used to a new verb.)
Worst of all, these pseudo phones go boop, boop, boop when you punch in the numbers. Okay, they have cords. Cloth cords, even. That’s quaint. But it’s only so retro. You never really leave the 21st century.
Kraft has a commercial for microwave Mac & Cheese with a kid dialing in to talk with his fave band at the local radio station. He’s got three phones going — a cordless, a cell phone and a corded phone (which may or may not be a genuine dial phone). It’s the corded phone that gets through, of course, and when the microwave beeps and his Mac & Cheese is done, he abandons the rock band because he can’t do both on that phone-cord leash.
It’s cute. But it’s late 80s retro. It entirely skips the panicky thrill of speed dialing in to the radio station in the first place.
I’m talking about the original speed dialing, whipping that dial around as fast as possible to be Caller 15. In the 70s, dial speed was crucial for winning radio call-in contests. It was pre-videogame manual dexterity. Speed was all in your delivery, of course — that dial spins back at its own slow pace. Winners were made on how fast you could spin 0 in, then catch 7 once the dial came home. You got a busy signal, you hung up and started again. No redial. Pound and star? Sissy stuff.
Maybe that’s the point of retro styles, anyway: You look back but you move forward. You keep pound and star. You forget there ever was a rrrip chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck in the first place. You forget numbers once came in seven digits. You forget what a busy signal sounds like. You’re too busy to deal with a busy signal, anyway.
Thank heaven for eBay.
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