Keeping in Touch

I'm in the mood to buy a telephone....again.

We currently have about five models of telephones in the house. The oldest is the bright red Trimline phone that I've had for about 25 years. The only repair to it has been the cord from the handset to the body; it couldn't take the wear and tear that a certain then-three year old could dish out (Those little clips are not nearly strong enough!) Its in the room we call the library (a very small bedroom), where it is plugged into a phone line we use just for work. In that same room we have a set with speakerphone, memory dial (we don't use that), mute (very important -- in fact, the reason we bought that particular model), and a cordless handset with a headphone jack (also important). The handset has a speaker function, too, which is kind of neat, as when one of us is working from home and listening to a tedious teleconference (is there any other kind?) we can put the handset on mute, turn on the speaker, and just set it on a kitchen counter while making lunch or a cup of tea.

The phone which had been in the library is now in the kitchen -- its also a speakerphone, with redial and memory, but no mute (bummer). That one has the answering machine and a cordless handset with jack. Downstairs, there is a wall phone with a way-long cord, installed back in the days when we would periodically lug home a dial-up terminal that communicated at the ungodly speed of 300 baud. (Hey, we can work at home, don't have to go in for problems at oh dark thirty! Yay!) My mother has a big-button phone that is hooked into her Lifeline service. And to round things out, we have an aging cordless model in the master bedroom -- the phone used to be my mother's, she didn't want it any more, and we thought 'waste not'.

So why am I looking at a new phone? Specifically, the Panasonic KX-TG5110 ? For what I freely admit is a silly reason: none of the phones can accept an additional remote handset, so if the phone rings while we're in the living room, where there is no handset, we have to sprint into the kitchen to pick up. Or leave one of the cordless handsets lying in there, so that later we can say 'hey, where's the handset?' (BTW: Do NOT hit the 'locate' button on the base to make the way-loud beeper on the handset go off if your wife has just found the handset and is carrying it back to the appropriate room. After she picks up the handset again, she will NOT thank you.)

Ah, modern travails.