Unplugged

Tonight I did something I haven’t done in years.

I unplugged the phone.

Geoff and I, unlike almost everyone we know our age, still have a land line.  There are a lot of good reasons to have a land line and we’ll have one until there are better reasons not to have one.  But tonight it was all just too much ringing.

Aside from the fact that it is nearly impossibly for us to get people to call us on our land line first because we get little to no reception on our cell phones in our home, we constantly have to fight with people forgetting we even have one.  Our home phone usually rings with calls from doctors, CVS, and telemarketers.  Yes, we’re on every Do No Call list available and I report the calls as often as I can.  Yes, we have caller ID and we simply don’t answer when “Bank Card Srvcs” or “Research Center” calls.  They both called tonight within 20 minutes of one another and they will never stop, no matter what I do.

But tonight all we wanted to do was eat dinner and watch a DVD we’d gotten from the library.  That’s was all.  We’d both worked a long day with people after us all day to do stuff and get things and the phone rang all through dinner and stopped the movie at least twice.  I’d finally had it.  I just unplugged the thing.  It’s still plugged into the wall, that’s too much of a pain to get to, but the cordless is unplugged so that every phone in the house says NO LINE on it and the corded phone has the ringer off.

Since our cell phones are functionally useless in the house unless they’re being used for WiFi, we’re on the internet and off the phone right now.  And you know what?  It’s quiet.

I think I’ll do this more often.  It’s not that I don’t want people to call me, it’s just that after a day of the phone ringing non stop at work, having it ring every 10 minutes while trying to get a little down time at home is too much.

Sometimes you just need quiet.

~Kelly