End of the Landline: I've Gone Full Cellular

Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025 was an important day in my life. At exactly 4:01 p.m., I ended a 47-year relationship with the telephone number 631-324-6266, which was the landline at my house.

It had not been easy to end this relationship. Twenty years ago, I had tried to do it. But my house, at that time, had objected.

Had my house not been there, through thick and then? Had it not kept us safe and sound during emergencies? Had it not celebrated the good times?  Didn’t I owe the house its telephone number?

It was its identity. Right there, along with the address, memorialized with my name in the thick Suffolk County telephone book that came every year, alphabetized.

The landline, our house phone, hooked us up to the outside world. Its wire stretched out across the front lawn to a pole on the street, which not only carried it through town and the rest of the Hamptons, but continued by wire on poles all the way to California and even to foreign lands by other wires, thick ones that had been laid across the bottom of the ocean. Don’t even think of cutting this house phone.

I caved. Okay, I said. We’ll keep the phone. The house said it was happy. Well, if the house was happy, I was happy.

Until now. The thing is that the cost of keeping this house phone kept going up and up. What had been a modest gift to my house we no longer used had cost just $23 a month. But soon it was $100 a month. Then $160 a month.

At the same time, the local service at no extra cost shrunk. At first, the coverage included as far as just outside the city. New York City was long distance. But now long distance kicked in just past Riverhead. Although, as I said, we never used it. The time had come.

On Monday morning, Nov. 3, when Verizon opened for business, I made the call. The house was quiet. But it knew.

Verizon would not make it easy, though. I got a recording. When I told it I wanted to cancel my landline service, it said I should hold for a representative, but my wait time was 22 hours. I could wait if I wished. Or I could get a call back when it was my turn. And I wouldn’t lose my turn.

I went for the call back. There were times available for the next day. It named them. I chose one. 4 p.m. And the recording said that 4 p.m. would mean between 4 and 4:30. And I said fine.

Poor Verizon. People must be cancelling all over the place. I looked around. Still the house said nothing.

And then, today, the next day, although I had forgotten about it, my cell phone rang at 4:01 and it was a woman from Verizon. I decided I should do the deed outside, on the deck. Beyond earshot. And so I went out.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked. “I see it’s been 47 years. That’s a long time.”

“Yes it has been. But I just don’t use it anymore.”

I thought she might try to talk me out of it. And I was right.

“Are you sure when I cancel 631-324-6266 you wouldn’t just want a new number?”

That was it. The whole effort. A very feeble attempt.

“No. We’d thought it would be useful if the power went out. But now we have a big outdoor generator for when the power goes out.”

“Okay,” she said.

I looked up at the house. It was being a complete gentleman about this. Well, it will be over shortly. And it was.

I sat down out there at the picnic table and thought of things we did with our landline in the old days. One bitter cold January night at 2 in the morning, with the wind whistling and temperature below zero, someone came into our house. I heard the front door downstairs open and close.

Going to the balcony I looked down and saw a man in the dark sitting in the club chair in our living room, shivering, a throw blanket from our sofa wrapped around him. I called down to him.

“What do you want?”

He answered in Spanish. He’d been at a friend’s house. Playing cards. Drinking. Thought he could walk home. He couldn’t. I tell him to wait right there but told me a phone number. He shouted it up. And, retreating to the bedroom, I called it, then went downstairs to sit with him until they came and got him.

There were so many other stories. Strange men talking dirty and upsetting women who’d answered. Answering machine messages with quartets singing “Don’t hang up, oh no, just wait and don’t hang up.” My daughter, at 16, waiting by the phone all afternoon for him to call.

We had a wall phone in the kitchen with a long cord and desk phones in the living room and bedrooms. Phone booths. I remember when Clark Kent, in the movies, would run into a phone booth at a gas station, change into Superman and fly off.

You could call “Directory Assistance” and operators would look up people’s numbers if they had it listed. Almost everybody did. Except a few.

“That number is unlisted,” the operator would say in a snooty voice when one, it turned out, was.

And then, around 1980, they came out with fax machines. A wonder of the age. And you could receive a fax only on your landline.

At the time, I told the house, “Well, we have a use for you again.”  Faxes came in at a desk in the TV room. But soon, faxes could be received on a cell phone. And so, once again, we stopped using the house phone.

We even turned off the ringer. How bothersome. And that, back in 2005, was the last time we ever used it.

But still we’re in the phone book. Until a new one comes out. Right? Or isn’t there one anymore?

And the house now understands. I went over to the shingled wall by the slider that connected the deck to the kitchen and gave it a pat.

“Love you,” I said. And the house, in return, somehow, told me it loved me too.