Not so long ago it was an essential tool to aid in the struggles of coming of age. Now less than a third of New Zealand households still have a landline telephone.
On Thursday morning at 10.45, a thrill buzzed in the air, possibly only detectable by journalists. Another tranche of census data had been bestowed upon us. It was unveiled, little fact by little fact, on my greasy screen. We continue to get older. True, I thought. Wellington city is the queer hotspot. Hmmm, I mused. Almost everyone drives to work. Errghhhh. Median rent has gone up by almost a third. Grrrrrrr. And then: telephone use has dropped dramatically. My heart drained itself of blood and forgot to fill itself up again.
Landline telephones, the screenless chunky things attached to a cable and not our hands, were once pillars of households. In the 2006 census over 92% of New Zealand households had a landline. It dropped just a little to 86.5% at the 2013 census. Then, in the 2018 census only 62.5% of households had a landline. But by March 2023, this had come crashing down to 31%. Sad! The landline’s last outpost in New Zealand (well… kind of) is on the Chatham Islands, where almost three in four households still have one. By contrast, nine out of 10 New Zealand homes have a new technology called the internet.
Back in the day, when the telephone rang, you’d have no idea who was calling. Your mum would yell “PHONE” loud enough for Barbie to get a fright, and you’d count to three before moving in the hopes that maybe your brother would have to introduce himself down the mysterious wire (alas, he had friends and he was at one of their houses).
But, as Barbie lost her magic, becoming a lump of beige plastic rather than a sparkly-eyed friend, the landline began to show its potential. You could call the movies and ask what was showing if you didn’t have the newspaper. You could call a random number and quickly hang up. You could bolster up courage, dial again and pretend to order pizza from a confused lady. You could stand outside your sister’s closed door, wait for her to call someone, then tip-toe downstairs and pick up the other receiver as quietly as humanly possible. You could dial 137, hang it up and run away. You could ring The Edge and try to get a free ticket to Big Day Out. And eventually, you could give a friend at school your number, and wait for her to call once you got home.
After two spaghetti boats, a Milo and close inspection of pores in the bathroom mirror, the phone would ring. For the first time in your life, you felt like an actual teenage girl. Literally, exactly like Regina George. By this era, phones were cordless. There was no longer a coiled wire to nervously wrap around your fingers, but thankfully, you could go outside, beyond the earshot of your parents, to listen to absolute drivel from the receiver for hours. Her voice would float up, I’d stare at the tree, and there would be no reason to stop, because within the same city, a cost per minute did not exist. Then Mum would come out in an absolute state because she’d been waiting for an important call. (Was it really more important than what to wear to the social, though?)
In The Spinoffice, when the landline bombshell dropped on Thursday morning, everyone over 30 started calling out random numbers. Well, not entirely random – it was their best friend’s number more than 20 years ago, or their cousin’s number. Some reminisced that when crushes would ring, “my brothers would drill them and humiliate them until they gave up and never called again.” One would get a massive lecture from their friend’s dad when they called after 9pm because that was curfew, “and I’m confident you’re aware of this young man”. One remembered having to apologise every time she visited her friend since their calls were punctuated by parents picking up the receiver and saying, “Sinead get off the fucken phone”.
Half the words I spoke or heard through the phone were “like” as partially developed frontal lobes tried to grasp at making sense of the world’s delights and girls cooler than ourselves who were already doing this or that. “Like, how?” I already have outed myself as a fossil, so now let me delve into kids these days. Online and IRL, “brainrot” words are taking over. Rizz, skibidi, fanum tax, sigma, Ohio, mogs (since I know these, they’re probably already over). They’re words born of living online, insular to platforms like TikTok and Roblox and an under 25 age band. Quick little abbreviations whose meaning could be contextual, could be a reference or could be nothing at all. They can be sent between screens at any time, and any place, without having to negotiate around any family members.
No matter how many films picture coming of age in warm dusty sunlight, it kind of sucks. Weird things are happening to your body and you’re pretty sure no one likes you. At least when there was a telephone in the house and it rang, you had one piece of evidence that maybe they did. Much better than an endless scroll of content, or tiny, pretty much meaningless messages.
The internet came for the landline in its first breath. Yes, because you’d pick it up and be greeted by what sounded like the computer’s subconscious. But also because the teen girls were now on MSN, messaging you about the crushes they were messaging at the same time. The silent message bubbles won.