Do your parents still have a landline with your old phone number?

Well, if your phone dies or there’s a break-in or a fire and your phone isn’t right next to you, you’ll be glad that you had a landline.

A couple of years ago, my sister asked me to go to the grocery store, gave me her debit card and insisted that I use it (and not do as I usually do and just pay for it). She forgot to give me her pin, so I guessed and used the last four digits of our childhood phone number — the same as my pin — and of course it worked.

My dad (he’s 80) did up until about two years ago. Same number since he moved into the house in ‘66. Kept it because it was part of his cable/internet package.

Here’s the thing though, although we were referring to it as a landline and thought it was, it really wasn’t. If the cable/internet/electricity went out the phone was useless.

My parents still have a landline, with the same number they've had for nearly 50 years (they're in their 70s). My mom and her friends and sisters still call each other up and talk on the landline. Women my mother's age are the only people I know who still do this.

And yes, they also get the newspaper delivered.

My parents still have a landline. They've had the number since the early 90s. But my dad has brought up getting rid of it since no one calls it, except for my grandma.

I got rid of my landline five or six years ago.

[quote]Well, if your phone dies or there’s a break-in or a fire and your phone isn’t right next to you, you’ll be glad that you had a landline.

Some people refer to their VOIP phones as "landlines." This would be phone service you get from your internet provider, or something like Ooma or Magic Jack. These will not work when the power is off and your internet is down. The only kind of phone to have in an emergency is a copperwire landline. Unfortunately, these are fast disappearing since the telcoms don't want to maintain the lines and want to switch everything to fiber.

My 89-year old father still has one, but it's out in the barn and he can't hear it ring. So he goes out every few hours to see if he has any messages. Gives him something to do.

Fellow eldergays: Who remembers their phone prefix? Mine was DRake 6-

My parents (90 and 85) gave up the landline they had for 62 (!) years a couple of years ago.

Honestly, for no reason at all, I felt somehow betrayed. "But that's OUR number..."

I wasn't the one paying the bill. I'm proud of them, actually. They cut the cord with cable TV about the same time. I have a harder time doing that, living on Maui where cable (literally, buried cable from across the Pacific) seems to be king.

The funniest thing about the old land line is that my parents got the number when we moved into our brand-new house in the early 1960s. The number of our neighbors across the street (hi, Roma and Bernie!) was the same as ours, except the last digit was one lower.

This is back when dialing long distance was a big thing, and an area code actually gave you a clue as to where someone was calling from. Good times!

^^^ This was also back when the middle digit of every area code in the United States was either "0" (if that was the only area code for an entire state, or DC) or "1" (if the state had two or more area codes).

My mom was still using a land line, *plus* paying rent on a phone (to the phone company). She showed me her bill and I pointed out how many hundreds of dollars she had been paying in rent for two phones. She didn't cancel her land line, but she immediately purchased two phones and returned the rentals.

This was a while ago.

I live in California. Last week at least two counties east of the Central Valley had neither cell service, internet, or landline service for almost 24 hours. An underground cable was cut somewhere, owned by AT&T, and Verizon uses AT@Ts infrastructure. Also 911 was not working and it’s still fire season. So there goes the myth of the safety of the landline.

That was perhaps the most upsetting part of my mom moving out of my childhood home two decades ago.

One of these days I plan to dial the number.

I still have one (though as R6 mentions it isn't a true landline, but VIOP through Comcast). I'm 48.

The reason is because Comcast basically gives it to me for free as part of a package. Why wouldn't I keep it?

I keep my landline for fax use - which has often been necessary when sending records to health insurers. Plus for the rare times occasions when someone hasn’t updated our mobile numbers.

Who is still faxing?

We still have the landline, although it goes out when there’s a cable outage 🫤

I had bought mom a cell phone but she didn’t use it so I cancelled the fucking service. I still had about 40 dollars to pay for the phone so I paid it off.

It’s a brick sitting somewhere in the junk drawer.

R17, you seem incensed. I hope you don’t own any semi-automatic weapons.

61 in Los Angeles, and I have a lanline through Ooma. I work from home and the connection is better. Also, easier to cradle it when speaking.

OP’s mama boundaries have been stated.

R19, do you also have a favorite mug to cradle?

I keep a landline because there's no fucking way I'm going to dial my iPhone with a pencil.

I have the same landline number that I grew up with back in the 60s. I had it transferred into my name when I bought the house from my Dad's estate.

I don't need and don't want to pay for a cell phone, so yes, I still have a landline through AT&T.

I don't have our old family telephone number but I have a friend who does have theirs. It's cool that he was able to retain that!

Yeah, my dad still has the phone number we had when I was growing up.

Yes they do.

They mostly use their cell phones now but the landline from when we were born is still in service.

R18, I’m not R17, but those senior technological trial and errors are expensive.

I get it, R17.

Yes. Since 1980.

I’m 66 & I just gave up my landline last month. I had been paying $65+ for a service I hadn’t used in years. I kept it far too long because I wanted to keep voicemail messages from loved ones no longer alive. I figured out how to save the messages on my phone. And R4, I get the NYT delivered M-F & a local paper delivered a few days a week.

R16, some institutions, like IRS, still require fax rather than attaching to email.

Here's a question related to OP's:

I know you each know your parents' multi-decade landline phone numbers by heart.

But after they canceled their landline, did you memorize ANY of your parents' remaining numbers? I haven't yet, but I'm thinking I ought to know one.

I get it that they are stored in my iPhone and iEverything, but it's possible I might need to reach them without having access to any of those.

I know their cell phones only because they’ve had the same numbers for about 20 years at this point - the cells started out as “car phones.” Remember that? And then flip phones eventually. So I think we learned the numbers because it was a time before you could even store it anywhere electronically…

[quote]I don't need and don't want to pay for a cell phone, so yes, I still have a landline through AT&T.

Do you ever leave your house?

r31 my grandmother died almost 25 years ago and I can still remember her phone number.

[quote] But after they canceled their landline, did you memorize ANY of your parents' remaining numbers? I haven't yet, but I'm thinking I ought to know one.

No, I don't have any phone numbers memorized except for one person's. His phone number has a lot of zeros in it, plus the prefix is easy to remember, as well.

Yeah, it would be good to memorize one or two important phone numbers.

The only phone number I remember is my own.

That's why I understand the importance of those internet boards where you can reach missing family members after a disaster - like the fires that happened in Maui.

What you said, OP -- ha! And mine is probably also one of the last landliners in the nation without call-waiting and just a busy signal (for which if I try to get them on the flip Android phone, it's not on because "It's too complicated to figure out and use," despite multiple demonstrations!).

I had my land line up until 3 months ago. It was only for the occasional incoming call from relatives or friends I rarely communicated with. I decided to go just with my cell phone instead. I'll be saving about $1400.00 a year.

Not at all, R18.

I am pissed i paid for a whole year of service that she didn’t even use.

But, oh, well. 🤷🏻‍♀️😬

no, they’re all dead

r38 My parents paid a monthly fee for AOL for 15 years before they (I) realized it was free.

Yup.

My dad still has the same copper wire landline and phone number we got when our family moved in in 1966. It was GTE growing up, then Verizon. The area code changed to 330from 216 in the 1990s. He got mad in 2000 when they implemented an overlay area code which required ten-digit dialing, even for calls in the same town.

I remember when we used to be able to dial 2 plus the last for numbers in our exchange instead of all seven digits.

R8, LEhigh 4

R31, I can remember four different phone numbers we had growing up, the earliest one from kindergarten. I remember my grandparents' numbers as well. My grandma just died in June, so hers is still fresh, but my grandpa died 20 years ago.

I have no idea what my parents' numbers are. I always have to ask them when I am setting up one of their accounts or something. They've had those numbers for over a decade and I can't tell you three consecutive digits from either.

My family did something unusual over two generations. My grandparents and my parents both changed their phone numbers after about 35 years. (My parents changed theirs to avoid bill collectors--I don't know why my grandparents did.) I remember when my grandparents did theirs. I was little and my teenage aunt and I played "phone company" and placed the stickers provided by the phone company with the new phone number on the dials of the phones around the house.

They lived in the same area and there were at least 10 different phone exchanges. They both got new phone numbers with their same exchanges, which I think the phone company representatives probably picked on purpose.

My parents change happened about 7 years ago and I still fumble when I need to call or say their number. It's a Verizon FIOS line.

R10 , actually, the 1s came before the 0s when dolling out original area codes. That was because on a rotary phone, it was much faster to dial lower numbers, and 0 was the highest position in the dial and therefore took the longest. It’s why the early area codes were assigned in accordance to populations of respective cities. Hence 212 for NY (fastest to dial), 213 for LA & 312 for Chicago (second fastest to dial) and so on down the list.