From this DIY procedure, I gather that telecom companies where you are don’t offer the option of a home phone via VoIP connection over the fibre optic network?
Icelandic telecom companies do and I even had one for couple of years, albeit registered as a work number, when I started as a sole practisioner from a home office. That was in 2013-2015 and the only time it rung, it was a court secretary calling to tell me I was supposed to be in court and it was about to begin (which would mean the other side could move to rule on it in their favour, as no one contested their claims). I asked her which case and what client, while feeling a measure of anxiety, but could fortunately establish that I was not the attorney who should be in court, as I had handed the case off to another attorney long ago, as court records showed, but they had not changed the listed attorney in their system. I had them do that and also change my listed contact number to my mobile.
If I had one, so might others, and not all of them would have moved and decided not to take the redudant telephone with a dock connected to the fibre optic. So, just now, I called the home number for my father’s household. It rung. The call was ringing inside the house.
So, these home phones which so baffle and frighten my niece still exist. One of them apparently located in her grandparents’ home. She’s just never heard it ring and probably never recognized it as a phone, if she’s even seen it. It lived in a charging dock on a shelf behind the couch in the TV room, so you don’t see it unless you are specifically reaching for it over the sofa. I haven’t noticed whether it was still there or not, hence the experiment.
Oh, and it also works if we have a powercut. Which will no longer be the case when they switch off all the old phone network across the country by next year. Idiots.
All of the US internet providers offer them, but they’re outrageously priced compared to bare trunks, especially for a rarely used line. For my provider, which is the actual phone company that would provide a pots line (if they still do that for new customers…), it’s between $20 and $40 a month, depending on whatever things I get with it. that probably includes unlimited usage. My sip trunk costs me about $8/mo, plus per minute charges (at something like $0.005/min. I haven’t price shopped in a decade, it’s probably cheaper somewhere else…). $5 of that is a city tax, which I’m sure @pillbox isn’t paying.
I recall an ANALOG story about the introduction of video phones which predicted a wave of repulsion from housewives who discovered they could be seen in their own homes without having their make up perfectly in place. The horror!
It was under the editorship of John W Campbell who would never have printed a story featuring the stuff that people get up to nowadays and the things they will send people over their hand held radio phones with built in cameras. .
While people do send each other sexy pictures with our future tech vidphones, many of us also spend hours trying to make ourselves and our homes look perfect, before turning on video phones. Like, I’ve had players video-conferencing to a game session with the camera off, because, “the wife would kill me if I let anyone see into our home without tidying up first.” And social media influencers can freak out if filmed or photographed without hours of preparation.
People tie their self-worth to their pride in their homes, their abilities as the manager of the household and how perfectly presented their lives are, in videos or photos. Always have, since we’ve had households and guests to describe their impressions. As for appearance, well, it’s hard for people to avoid fixating on how others will judge theirs, because while living in human society, we constantly witness people judging each other on how they look. Not wanting people to see you looking less than your best is not even an irrational aversion. Many people are looking and judging.
Not caring what others think of you could be a symptom of a mental illness, psychological condition or personality disorder. I suppose it could also be being comfortable in one’s own skin, but that’s probably rarer than the mental illness explanation.
Not caring about what others think of you at all is pretty extreme, but not caring what people outside your family think of your appearance, or the appearance of your house, is pretty much where I’m at. I’m made to maintain the bare minimum by my spouse, basically.
This ilustrates my point neatly. It’s not just 1950s-esque caricatures of housewives who are concerned about how others will view their appearance or the appearance of their homes. It’s a very real concern among quite a lot of modern housewives, and, indeed, househusbands. The people who don’t care are the outliers, then and now.
The error of the article in ANALOG wasn’t that housewives would be against video telephones because people could see them without their makeup being perfect and see inside their homes while things were less neat than they wished. No, it was in not predicting that people would all own videophones, but mostly never use the video function without making at least the same effort as 1950s housewives would have, if they were told that they and their homes were going to appear on television.
I think I spent too much of my youth worried about what other people thought of me. In my more mature years, I just don’t give a damn anymore beyond the bare minimum really. I maintain basic hygiene and try to keep my house at a functional level of cleanliness. If anyone were to see it and be offended, they are welcome to leave.
Similarly, I don’t think I have ever washed our vehicles beyond the windshields. A car is a conveyance and nothing more. Anyone thinking otherwise is compensating for something. (No offense intended to anyone here if they take pride in their vehicles.)
You talk as if it’s an either/or thing, and it absolutely isn’t.
It’s perfectly possible to mind a little bit, but not really all that much, what people think of you. So one might not wear one’s tattiest, soil-encrusted gardening clothes to a friend’s dinner party, but still not need to spend hours cleaning and tidying before a Teams meeting in case someone saw a speck of dust.
Surely caring too much and caring not enough about what people think are both possible indicators of less than optimal mental health?
I disagree. Most people I see at home on screen seem happy enough for whichever corner of their house I’m seeing to be seen as it is. So the houses of tidy people look tidy; the houses of scruffy people look scruffy.
I see that a lot of people are reading ‘outlier’ as if I’m making a moral judgement, criticising or insinuating being an outlier in this regard is universally bad. It might be useful to keep in mind that the athletic ability, willpower and ability to perform well under pressure of people like Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, Pelé, Ferenc Puskás, Johan Cruyff and Harry Kane are extreme outliers.
Not to mention that I explicitly mentioned that being comfortable in your own skin might explain not needing the validation of strangers, caring what they think about what you look like or the presentation of your home on video calls.
It’s just that the constant need for validation, consequent playing of games and the need to curate everything which others can see about your life, are statistically the norm, because humans are social animals who play many different kinds of games while jockeying for status.
I assume that this sort of consideration is why automatic background removal became a thing once video calling was widely used in 2020.
One player in the various groups I’m involved with is permanently off-camera, and I do find it more clumsy to interact with them (I can’t tell without asking whether they’re actually paying attention, temporarily away to get some coffee, or dropped offline but the connection hasn’t dropped out yet), but hey, their choice.
Oh, I wish I knew how to do that on all the different software which enables videoconferencing.
Not because I personally care very much, but because some court functions now happen through teleconferences, especially if the court is a rural one with no airport and several hours of drive to it, and there are rules about neat appearance, as well as it potentially affecting the judge’s impression of me, and therefore the interests of my client.
Because it is up to the judge or his court secretary which specific program is used to set up the videoconferencing, I can’t just learn to find this option on one program, I would need to know where it is on all of them, because while Zoom and Teams appear most often, sometimes, we’re sent emails on which we click a link and it opens in a browser and I don’t even know which program the court is using.
There are external software that can do this. They show up to video conference programs as a camera. I haven’t looked at the state of this in several years, and there may be less available because it’s integrated in most applications.
It was a story and very much of its time (which was the sixties I think) and the assumption was that the phone companies would impose the new tech on all their customers without asking them. (That never happens right?)
I have goine through a phase of replacing my backtground on a video call with a beach or a jungle (the last is very good when my cat stalks through it) but finally decided I really didn’t care what people thought of my housekeeping and decor even when the person on the other end isn’t one of the geek community.
I don’t think it’s abnormal to have a certain disdain for the opinion of others especially at my age. To quote Elizabeth I: “They say? What say they? Let them say!”
Or to quote me at the age of foiurteen: “Life is too short to spend it tucking your shirt tail in.”