I’ve started using Skype and a new IOGear Bluetooth headset to make international phone calls. I put about $12 on deposit with Skype a month ago, and haven’t gone through all of it yet. The only thing I cannot do so far is call my wife’s cellular phone.
I also managed to get a local telephone number back in my home city. If I’m online, my folks can call me for free. Skype includes voicemail, so if I’m not online, I still get the message. That service cost $40.00 per year, and it goes into the Yellow Pages as a commercial number. Most of my voicemails have been from AT&T trying to get me to sign up for an 800 number.
I’ve talked to my elderly grandmothers this way a couple times now. Trying to get them to understand that I’m walking around my living room in Japan while connected wirelessly to my laptop in the kitchen through my wireless fiber-optic Internet connection is quite the challenge. Once they understand, they’re probably chuckling to themselves about my connectivity problems and thinking we’ve come a long way since the party line.
And what, pray tell, do you know about a “party line?”
Believe it or not, Mom, a couple of my friends in the rural Rolla area had party lines. Somehow, these fossils of the telephone world existed in obsolescent use into the 1990s.