Party Line

For those who grew up in the 60's and early '70s in the Philippines, having a direct (single) telephone line was a luxury. Back then, if you had a landline ( it was the only type), chances are, you shared it with a party line.

Our family got its first telephone line back in the late 60's; it was provided by the lone Philippine telephone company, PLDT (Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company). The machine was colored black and it was a rotary telephone. Me, my brother and sisters were all in heaven when the technician installed it in the living room.

But like most people we knew, we had a party line. This meant we could only make calls when the party line was off the hook. And it also meant having some of your conversations listened to.

In our case, we knew who our party line was; they lived a block away from our house. This made telephoning a little bit uncomfortable because you could not really be sure who was listening : your mother or your neighbour.

Even in the United States, having a party line was common in the 50's and 60's. I remember watching recently on the TBS channel, a movie that starred Doris Day and Rock Hudson, in which they were party line to each other.

Having a telephone when you are an adolescent also meant having phone pals (today this is known as having text mates). So me and my siblings used to have all sorts of phone pals, some funny and some weird characters of our teenage years.

In a household of eight children and a father who was a busy lawyer, the phrase "umuusok ang telepono" (the phone is never off the hook, the phone is "burning") was an understatement. On summer mornings or vacation time, before nine, my father was the principal user of the phone, but once he got out of the house, me, my siblings and the party line ruled the airwaves.

So these days that almost every household has access to a landline and additionally to several cell phones, how do I react to the telephone? I only use it for very important calls.

I am not thrilled with it at all. I suspect, more and more people react to the telephone the way I do. If not, why then do we have countless telephone features such as the "call display" and even the answering machine, which basically answers first, before the human owner. This goes to show that we only want to have a conversation if we really needed to, and of course, to shield us from the telemarketers which are the modern door-to-door salesmen of the 50's and 60's.

The telephone of my youth has long been dead. I could no longer feel my finger circling its way into the dial, sometimes deliberately prolonging the dialling time while one thought of a good opening line to tell a secret phone pal. In place now is the smallish cell phone, cold and square.