GeekForce

I’m moving stuff around the house and my teenager’s straightening out the breezeway.  I was just in the back bedroom ensuring that my cats hadn’t messed up the fax machine by knocking it down (again) off the desk.  I glanced, then held, a very old telephone.

It’s a desk model-RTH6V GTE phone, a Bell Labs offshoot unit with newfangled pushbuttons.  Suddenly, we didn’t have to dial a rotary spring wheel anymore!

 I’ll share the phone’s origin thusly, as there is required background involved:

I left my job in 1991, heading for greener pastures (in beautiful North St Louis). Amidst my final week, I got three freebie lunches by vendors, a pizza party by my employees and (mean-ass) boss, one two hour unauthorized lunch break, and some VERY relaxing work duties.

As with any late-twenties-person in the workforce, I’d received my share of stabs, jabs, insults, rants, raves, betrayals, insurrections, accusations, usurpings, plots, schemes, false treaties, backstabbing, immaturity, brutality, homicide attempts, suicide attempts, crooked tounges, crooked backs, intrigue, broken alliances, treachery, traps, nets, wiretaps, wrongful ass-chewings,  false blamings, unaccountability, and stolen pencils that actually wrote.

 Heck. You know, the usual workplace stuff.

(Add:  a lot of delightful people bravely defended me and bolstered my psyche; I don’t have a clue what happened to them all–I’m thinking perhaps one or two of the ladies are assuredly divorced by now and pursue-able…….)  

So, when the time came to pack my stuff to take my bride south a-ways and also take a fishing trip with my toddler and his grandpa before setting off for my days of glory and salt, I glanced around my (windowless) office, sorting out what I’d take and what would remain.

The phone!!  Hey!  This is the oldest one in the plant!!!  It came from Atlanta’s HQ office or something.   Damn, it sure is old and all, but that phone sure works well…….I, uh, bequeathed it to myself, and on that last day at the now-extinct Harland plant, I walked outta’ there, shook a bunch of hands, and carried a particularly fat bag.  Those nice (and those not-so-nice) people never, ever saw that phone again. 

That was in the summer of 1991, when the phone was easily 15 years old, and likely more.  The phone STILL kicks ass.  It’s been dropped by infants, thrown up on once by my (now 18-year-old) toddler son, and believe it or not, fell out of the back of my ‘67 International pickup truck as I moved from place ‘A’ to place ‘B’ amidst my ancient pre-divorce exile and disgrace.  The fall-to-the-road-at-40mph-impact’s effect on the sturdy phone?  I picked up the pieces, which were only two: 1) the polyethylene face plate template for the buttons, and 2) the remainder of the phone and chassis, which stayed loyally attached via it’s handset cord…. 

…I plugged it into my temporary apartment’s phone jack, and why, presto!  Dial tone!

Since then, it somehow acquired nail polish on the front of it–I can tell that this is what it is ’cause paint thinner doesn’t even cut it.  No matter.  Pink, semi-glittery blots on a button here and there add charm and a certain vibrancy to the phone’s native ivory-to-tan hue.

Can you buy one just like it, you ask?  Hell no. A very long time ago, GTE sent its phone assembly operations to either Taiwan, China, Mexico, Malaysia, Albania, Tanzania, or Uzbekistan.   It’s a hassle to get to any of those places to shop.  You’d also have to master time travel so you’d land back on the planet in the 70s, so to make all mini circuit boards and resistors vanish into the future.  The American GTE employees who built and supported my ’marathon’ phone are now decaying in retirement homes, waiting for liver transplants, or lie peacefully in cemetaries.

I would like a wall rotary phone, though………