Some things sound better than they work out. No harm in trying new things - smart when you can say Nope, this aint working and find a solution that works for you.

 

I have a 10 foot charging cable next to my bed I can typically make it all day without charging but my use may be different

everyone in the hosue has one next to thier bed

I also have a charging cable at my desk

and every vehicle has one , this is a must you will need it when you have car trouble and waiting for a tow truck at 5% battery sux been there done that with my old flip phone

charging cables go bad also so having a spare around is a good idea even if you only have the short one

they also now make a shoe that fits on many of the popular tool batteries that has a usb port , that is a great option if you already have those batteries.

RIDGID 18V USB Portable Power Source with Activate Button AC86072B - The Home Depot

RIDGID USB Portable Power Source with Activate Button ensures your phone and tablet will never go dead on the jobsite again.

www.homedepot.com

I know they have them for Milwaukee and dewalt also

so your friend bought an 800 dollar phone he spends probably 80+ dollars a month on and a 15 dollar cord that would make his life easier is too much.

 

I owned a cellphone for about 6 months before I realized that I had LESS freedom and MORE inconvenience with it than without it. I also found that I never spoke to my friends anymore, it was all just "texting". I went back to the curly cord mounted on the kitchen.

Its funny to me to see young people stare in utter amazement when they find out I dont have a phone. In my observation I also think the cellphone is doing something strange to people's psychology. Theres this "group think" that has taken over society that is very unhealthy, as well as a type of addiction and withdrawal that is notable when the cellphone is out of reach. More objective study is needed to determine the true cost of the cellphone on society, unfortunately it would be difficult to find uncompromised researchers anymore.

 

Twenty years for me. I'll never go back. The landline was so undependable it's the reason I quit it. I've found I'm not stuck waiting for that important return phone call anymore. I can go about doing what I had planned on doing.

Like @GREENCOUNTYPETE I also have cables in several areas. Just in case.

Now I have a watch that also acts as a phone. Why? I live alone. I do stuff that isn't considered completely safe to be doing alone and I have heart issues. The watch will call 911 if something happens to me. I know it works since it's tried calling 911 twice when I knocked the snot out of the watch.

 

I may be the last person with both cell and land line-ish technically it is through the internet provider so it looks and works like a home phone but technically runs to the internet modem.
it does 911 correctly which our cellphones often do not do here , we live where you could get a cell tower from a neighboring jurisdiction
I had it so that my kids had a way to call before they had cell phones.

I guess I could get rid of it I seldom answer it any more just let the machine get it
it may have changed but last time I had heard in our area to get internet you had to keep the phone also , I know some people who keep a hone hooked to their modem so when they need to get service they can but the ringer stays off and the phone stays behind the tv as it also does their cable.

I don't have cable.

 

I may be the last person with both cell and land line-ish

I've got a land line. The only ones who ever call it are the foreign real estate flippers who want to buy my house at 1/3 of it's value and the doctor's office which never updates their computer dialed appointment reminder system. At $50 a month it's really not worth the expense, but it's still there, complete with curly phone cord.

 

The budget IPhone SE is known for having poor battery life. On the other hand my phone was under $200, I can talk on it for four hours, watch Youtube videos for an hour, and still not plug it in until I go to bed. And I don't get spam calls every ten minutes like my parents' landline.

That said, I grew up in the 80s so even I remember what it was like to not have people call you five minutes after texting you to find out if you got their text. I kind of miss that.

 

ahh the days of 0600 phone calls , because it was when people you knew well knew you would be up because you had to be at work at 7 so they could catch you before you left in the morning
my parents and a couple friends would call if they wanted to get ahold of me.

when I got married my wife hated 0600 phone calls , didn't help that a few of them were telling us relatives died we had cell phones by then so they were a lot less common than in my single pre cell phone days

 

I dumped my cell phone. We live in a hollow only 2 miles from town, but service was "iffy" at best and with the new 5G, none. If I went upstairs and hung out the south window, stuck my foot out and my arm to the left....... you get the point. Can't see paying for service I am not getting. Of course, according to Verizon we have service. NOT.

We also can't get radio signals, and our tv antenna is at the peak of our two story house. We get 2 channels and you have to turn the antenna in different directions for each.
I have a land line, because I would have no phone otherwise. It is also my internet. Slower than molasses, but you take what you can get. I refuse to pay $150 a month for internet/cable tv because here that is the smallest/cheapest package they offer.

I lived for years without a cell phone. Not having one is a bit inconvenient, but I don't need a leash so I can be kept track of and in contact 24/7.

 

ATT isn't installing land lines here anymore.

 

I'll just be glad when everyone goes with Starlink. That way when I can cut all the fiber optic lines I want and not get charged for it. I live in an area that has a line going from Houston to Dallas. Cutting that line means big fines.

Not that I have ever done that before. It just takes 3 times as long to dig a ditch when you know one is close by.

 

I'll just be glad when everyone goes with Starlink. That way when I can cut all the fiber optic lines I want and not get charged for it. I live in an area that has a line going from Houston to Dallas. Cutting that line means big fines.

Not that I have ever done that before. It just takes 3 times as long to dig a ditch when you know one is close by.

Not sure why, but Starlink always seems to trigger the word "Skynet".

 

Husband still has a cell. He needs it for work and it has service everywhere but here. Since he is self employed, we get a lot of calls on our land line. And if
I ever needed to call 911, at least it works.

 

All I have is a cell phone and I listen to talk radio, music, or read using my kindle app. It is in use for 16 hours a day. When the battery is low, I put it on the charger unless I am using the Kindle app and that is when I use this battery pack to charge it while reading. The battery pack will fit in my shirt pocket.

 

We have had cell phones for about 25 years. We dumped the landline about 10 years ago because all we were getting was telemarketers. Now the cell phones are getting that way too with calls and texts.

That said, I would be lost without my iPhone...I rarely get calls, but you can do so much on it.

 

We have had cell phones for about 25 years. We dumped the landline about 10 years ago because all we were getting was telemarketers. Now the cell phones are getting that way too with calls and texts.

That said, I would be lost without my iPhone...I rarely get calls, but you can do so much on it.

I've got the free spam call blocker on my phone. It's very effective. Sometimes too effective since it won't let calls go through that I have not already added or called at some point. Just dumps the calls to voicemail.

 

factoid: if you dial 911 from any cell phone, whether or not you have a paid plan, and any carrier has signal, it will go through. We found this out one night when we were watching TV and all of a sudden we had flashlights shining through all of our windows. Luckily, the swat team knocked and didn't knock the door down. It turns out my dil gave my 2yo grandson his sister's old cell phone to play with but took it off the plan. They had downloaded all the LooLoo kids and other songs so he liked to play with it. Still, he pushed the pretty red Emer button and voila! Late night visitors. They tried to talk to Mason but got no response, and with some dumbass cop show on the TV, the dispatcher got all excited about a hostage situation.
Another time, since the 'dead' phone was also blue-tooth enabled, he managed to turn on our neighbor's bedroom TV and play the Gummi Bear song for them in the middle of the night. So, make sure your TV has bluetooth deactivated if you don't want to broadcast your business around the neighborhood.

 

I recently upgraded from a flip phone to a smart phone. The battery on the smart phone can last for a week. This is because I can turn the power completely off. I only power it up when I want to make a call. I don't want every twit being able to get ahold of me whenever they want. As an added bonus I don't get robo calls on the cell phone. I suppose they take the number off the list after several failed attempts.

I have a land line at my permanent residence because I have fiber optic internet access from the phone company and they require that you have a landline phone. This is not a completely bad thing because I have to stand in the driveway, near the road, to make a phone call on the cell phone. Not nice at -60 f. Oh the joys of living in the boonies. A pet peeve of mine is that it's a long distance call (read costs extra) to call my neighbor 6 miles down the road on the land line because he's on a different rural phone company.

I have an off grid 40 besides my permanent place. I am curious to try using my cell phone as a hot spot to connect my computer to the internet. I get about 10 mbps there vs. 30 at home on the fiber optic. I think it should be enough for basic stuff like HT?

 

I have an I-Phone 8, mainly for making phone calls. (Duh!)
When I get home from work, I turn it off.

We got rid of the satellite dish almost a decade ago, we just don’t watch TV.

For both the wife and I there’s YouTube.
She watches gardening and cooking stuff, I watch WW2 history shows.
But even this is not anywhere near a full time deal. Both of us enjoy the silence of the country, and we both like to read.

 

My land line works even without power. I have an old princess phone that I plug in place of the cordless when our power goes out. If there is no power to charge your cell phone, then what? And it still has to have a signal in order to call 911.

 

I wonder, does the 911 call center have to have cell service to receive incoming calls? I know they go through the computer or the operator wouldn't be able to pull up your phone number or location.

 

I have no land line... the closest telephone pole is about 3 miles over the ridge. I have no cell phone... there's absolutely no signal back in the holler.

My family knows how to get me a message for truly important stuff. They also know it had better be truly important.

Otherwise, I come out to the community center and use the phone there to check in with family around the 1st of each month or so.

Other than that, I don't need to talk to anyone.

 

I have no land line... the closest telephone pole is about 3 miles over the ridge. I have no cell phone... there's absolutely no signal back in the holler.

My family knows how to get me a message for truly important stuff. They also know it had better be truly important.

Otherwise, I come out to the community center and use the phone there to check in with family around the 1st of each month or so.

Other than that, I don't need to talk to anyone.

you appear to have internet , so sending an email would seem a good way to reach you as often as you check it.

 

Our land line runs the Wi-Fi router, I think we may have a phone for it somewhere.
No power to charge a cell phone? Or run the router?
Do what my wife did for two days after Irma and I was 1,000 miles away.
She pulled her truck over to the dining room window, plugged her inverter into the cigarette lighter, and presto!! Even had a light on the circuit. And she could keep up with the outside world with her hand held HAM, since all the cell towers were inoperative.

 

Improvise, adapt, and overcome.

 

Posted 10/5/22 6:42 PM CDST

I started carrying a Pagenet digital pager furnished by my employer in 1982 and kept a roll of quarters in my truck to return local calls and one of my father's phone company cards for long distance calls. I also used my work pager as my home phone in my first apartment for 4 years from 82 to 86 because my one bedroom unit was two doors and 40 feet away from the soda and snack machine alcove which also had two wall mounted payphones because the complex catered to young singles.

If someone wanted to call me , they paged me and if i wanted or needed to return the call , I would pull into a gas station or walk to the vending machine alcove and check my voice mail or return the call.

Nice thing about the pager days was there was no device tracking and the pager towers in a 60 mile radius of the city where the pager service was based just sent out the signal making it easy to be in dead zones if I wanted.

In the 1990s my employer upgraded me to a cellphone which i still used as a pager and payphone because I don't drive and talk on a phone and still wait until I can get out of traffic to turn my flip phone from a pager to prepaid payphone mode.

I stopped carrying a cellphone in 2012 when the guy I did old car restoration with stopped our side gig and for 9 years I enjoyed life without a cell phone living by the "do you have the time" aspect that most everyone else had them and if i broke down on the road either someone behind me would call the law or with a half hour a patrol car would drive up on me.

When my old side gig partner wanted to go back into used car buying and old car restoration , I got a 4G flip phone and figured out how to hack out all the alerts, trackers, google, youtube , news feeds and other background apps to dumb it down to pager /payphone grade and i only have to charge it every 2 to 3 weeks.

 

Pretty much the same for me as @mreynolds. Hubs was down and we needed 911 knowing that my area code was for another state I asked for my county 911 when the wrong county answered the phone. The next time I called my call went straight to my 911 call center.

 

Then there are the dispatchers that don't have a clue. I called in a cow on the road from my cell phone one day. They asked me what color was the cow. I asked why that was important and she said so they can identify it when they get there.

There's only one cow in the road.

 

So the 911 centers must have some way of locating you even on a cell phone. I want to know how that works when half the people who live here aren't from here
and have kept their phone numbers from wherever they came from. Area code and all. Maybe one of you tech savvy people can explain it so I can understand it.

 

They triangulate from the cell towers your phone is transmitting from... the same way your mapping apps do.

 

when you get a phone service over internet set up the tech calls in the address of the install and that goes as the address of record

, with your cell when you make a 911 call it enables the gps in your phone and sends the quardinates it gets them close

but if your in a building it may pick the address closes which is your neighbors house and not yours

when they did the 2010 census they geo-located on the front porch of every address they could

I assume they did more in the 2020 census , my wife worked the 2010 census for a bit