The Hurricane Phone

Back in the day — you know, the day — you could say (as I used to) “I work for the phone company” and no one would doubt which phone company paid your salary. That’s why Lily Tomlin’s old “Ernestine the telephone operator” could say, without ambiguity, “We’re the phone company. We don’t have to care.”

Aside: Okay, listen, this isn’t the point of this post but now that I’ve got Ernestine on the brain I just had to look her up on YouTube. She’s there, all right. Here’s a sample:

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging…

Anyway, aside from the fact that there are now as many phone companies in the USA as there are neighborhoods, the technology itself has of course made huge leaps. Cell phones, obviously. Cordless phones. Caller ID. Phones that take pictures. In fact, phones do so much anymore that it’s easy to forget some of the things they no longer do.

For instance: when your power goes out, so do your phones.

[Old-timers, bear with me for this explanation.]

Yeah. See, it used to be that home telephones were powered by the very weak current running through the phone lines themselves. You didn’t have to plug them into a regular power outlet, which meant that when a fuse blew or the wind knocked a tree over on a power line ten miles away, your lights might go out but you could still grope around in the dark for a telephone — a phone, in short, with which you could report the outage to your electric utility.

Now, yes, there are cell phones. But accidents can happen to cellular service, too. And when they do, and you’ve got no power — so the base station of your home phone is a charcoal-gray plastic doorstop — there’s no way to call out in an emergency.

Here in Florida, we’re nothing if not weather-conscious, especially for the six months from June 1 through November 30: hurricane season. So when word filtered to The Missus and me of a new “hurricane phone,” we jumped right on it.

One of the folks in The Missus’s office first reported the news: our area’s local phone company, Embarq, was not just offering but actually giving away special battery-powered telephones, ideal for emergency use. As long as you have AA-size batteries, the report went, you’ll never be without your home telephone service. All you had to do was stop in at the local Embarq store and ask for one.

Before we actually got around to it, my mind couldn’t quite grasp what they meant by battery-powered phones. Surely Embarq wouldn’t be giving away cell phones, would they? Then what? Did the phone somehow communicate with the Embarq network… via… via satellite, maybe?

I directed my questions to the Embarq sales rep we talked to. I asked, “Is the phone somehow tuned to our number? Are they radio phones or something?”

As he rang up our order for $0.00, he stared at me as if I were dressed in a bearskin. “No,” he finally said, obviously fighting to keep his voice level. “They’re not radio phones.”

When we got home, I looked at the box the phone came in. Nothing in the glossy photos on the outside alluded to high technology (perhaps borrowed from the military or the NSA) or, for that matter, to hurricanes.

The first thing I pulled out of the box was not the phone itself, but a small yellow scrap of paper, the top portion of which appears at the top of this post.

Here’s what the whole thing looked like:

Right: the batteries provide Caller ID service. Nothing else. So then… how? “hurricane phone”? eh???

I didn’t bother taking a picture of the advanced technology which makes the phone able to withstand any and all regular power outages. I didn’t need to. Images of it are all over the Web, including the one on the right. And the best thing of all: you don’t even need an instruction manual to use it. Just plug one end into the base station, the other into the handset, and connect the base station to a regular old phone jack. Instantly, as if by magic, your phone will be powered by the very weak current therefrom!

Ain’t technology wonderful?