Wait for the beep

I have a real hate-hate relationship with my land line these days, no doubt because I'm the stay-at-home hausfrau who's the target of all the survey calls, political robocalls, credit card bullshit calls, stupid magazine subscription calls and—I'm sorry but I have to say it—annoying calls from charitable organizations (I'm looking at you, Nature Conservancy!). When I hear the phone ring, my hackles go up immediately and I'm sure my friendly greeting reflects that (I channel J. Jonah Jameson from the 1960s Spiderman cartoons, which we're currently rewatching on Netflix—sadly the robocallers are not intimidated). Many before me with far greater understanding of technology have noted that the phone is practically obsolete; only old people have land lines now, and medium-old people like us. Lindsay has some cockamamie reason for maintaining ours—something about the sound quality being better on the land line but since he almost never talks on the phone at home, and when he does it's on his cell, and really he just texts, I don't know why he cares.

Despite how much I hate the phone, I have a deep affection for the quaint accessories that go along with obsolete technologies. Do you remember your first answering machine? Did it not blow your mind? This commercial for a cassette with pre-recorded answering machine messages might just be my favorite commercial of all time. Wow, did we used to think it was funny—the dude was rapping—though we never actually did buy the product. I'm also a sucker for little wooden message-holding tchotchkes like this one, which sits on the kitchen counter next to my ugly cordless phone, collecting dust rather than messages. Who takes messages anymore? Who leaves them? Who has the patience to even listen to a voicemail? What hath God wrought?



Notice the phone in this commercial? It looks remarkably like San Antonio's Most Famous Flamenco Dancer's phone, which I bought a few months ago.

Steal these documents!

In honor of tax day (not for us—we got an extension), let us celebrate this relic from a more innocent, bygone age, when advertising the precise location of your valuable documents seemed like a swell idea. When identity theft was something that only happened on soap operas, and was usually the result of an amnesia-causing accident orchestrated by an evil twin. When a PIN was something you just stuck in a cushion shaped like a tomato. Ahhh, those were the days, my friends, we thought they'd never end, until they did.

Grot

Long before The Office (Brit version), before Office Space (pieces of flair!), before the American Office, there was a Brit sitcom called The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. I credit (or blame—take your pick) that show for forming my sense of humor and for giving me my earliest sense of what it meant to have a job, to work for The Man, to be a corporate stooge. Reggie Perrin is a seething-on-the-inside, sniveling-on-the-outside middle manager type with a classic barking bastard of a boss named CJ. This little wooden desk ornament (what do you call them?) is the sort of thing CJ would've had on his desk, and I only wish I'd found it when I actually had a job. Now it's on the desk of my home office and there's no one to be cowed by it except me. And the kids, when they're on my computer playing games.