Before throwing things away I like to take a picture of them and occasionally write a blog post about them, too. Here are a few words about my old friend, Mr. Magnavox Phillips Talking Caller ID Box.
Let me tell you what telephones were like in the 1980s. When you wanted to call someone you picked up the receiver, dialed their seven-digits (ten if it was long distance), and waited for them to answer the phone. If the person you called was talking to someone else, you heard a busy signal and had to call back later. If they weren’t home, the line would ring and ring and ring until you hung up. And when your phone rang, you picked up the receiver and said “Hello?” because you did not know who had just called you.
I think I was ten years old when we got our first answering machine. It was big and clunky and used two full-sized cassette tapes (one for the outgoing message and another one to record people’s messages). A few years after that, we got Call Waiting. All of a sudden, you could be talking to someone on the phone and hear a beep, know that someone else was trying to call you, and flip over to answer the second caller. This feature, by the way, was not free. Call Waiting originally cost seven dollars a month. Shortly after that came three-way calling, which allowed you to call of your friends at the same time. That also wasn’t free.
And then, sometime in the late 1980s, Caller ID was introduced. With Caller ID, you could actually see the phone number of the person who was calling you before you answered the phone! But the thing was, nobody had a phone that could display Caller ID information. Instead, people bought (or rented!) a Caller ID box, which was wired between your wall jack and your phone and displayed people’s phone numbers when they called. And if you had an answering machine you would run a phone cable from the wall to your Caller ID box, another phone cable from the Caller ID box to your answering machine, and then a third cable from your answering machine to your phone. AT&T eventually packaged Call Waiting, Three-Way Calling, and Caller ID together for either $10 or $15 a month.
So while Caller ID was a very cool invention, it also meant that each time the phone rang you had to run at top speed to your Caller ID box and quickly look at it to see who was calling. The solution to this problem was “talking caller ID boxes” like this one. Each time someone called, this box would announce the phone number out loud, one number at a time. It read them so slowly that by the time it was done, you had one ring left to decide whether or not you were going to answer the phone.
I bought this talking Caller ID box back when I was still in high school, and I know we used it when Susan and I lived in Spokane from 1996-1998. Sometime around the year 2000, we got a cordless phone that had a Caller ID display built into the handset, which allowed me to retire this box. Around that same time I got my first cell phone, which made this box obsolete. I’m not sure why I didn’t get rid of it back then, but last weekend I ran across it out in the garage and decided it was time to say farewell.
So goodbye, Mr. Magnavox Phillips Talking Caller ID Box. You served me well for many years, protecting me from telemarketers and fast food bosses trying to get me to come in on my day off. You were worth every penny, and I salute you. May you find a good home, or at least a dignified end, at Goodwill.
