Our home landline phone number gets switched off today.

When we got our first landline, it was provided by the Post Office.  We had a four-week wait – I guess they were too busy delivering letters.

When we got our current number after moving into the neighbourhood, it was only six digits.  We got a shiny seventh digit in front a couple of years before the milkman retired.  So it goes.

In the last couple of years, we affectionately called it our “mobile phone finder” as the only time we ever made outgoing calls on it was to ring our own numbers when we’d lost our phones somewhere in the house.

The only incoming calls were from people over 90 years old, pollsters, telemarketers, and the odd person we’d lost contact with over the decades who’d managed to find us in the ever diminishing phone book.

It usually rang around 6:30pm, just as we were sitting down to dinner. The family always told me to try to be nicer to the telemarketers, they’re only doing their job, and it must be an awful job too, despite me having put on what I’d thought was a hospitable tone. Honestly, I did try, but not infrequently felt put out by others feeling they had the right to try to invade my privacy and sell me stuff unprompted during precious family time. Good-bye, phone SPAM, I won’t miss you. And for any outbound telemarketers reading this, please accept my apologies – I know you’re really good people and would like to be doing something else.

I will no longer fear the Chorus Van of Death parked at the neighbour’s, at one time whose presence foretold a near certain impending long outage. Some joker put a digger through the main trunk cable at the intersection a few years ago, and things have never been the same since.

So, that’ll be an extra $20 in the pocket every month. It had become another one of those recurring billed services that you keep getting billed for long after it’s useful.

The only downside is that we’re now slightly more vulnerable to catastrophic failure at our telco, given that they supply our broadband as well as mobile services. We do have a burner phone with another telco’s SIM card, so hopefully that will work after the mobilepocalypse.

So good-bye, landline. You’ve transmitted many communications for us – good and bad – and been an integral part of our lives.

But what I miss the most is this:

If you want to reach me now, you can always get me on +64 27 220 2202.