So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[Fading Fast]

If you haven't a landline, then you are not really familiar with the problems of robocalls.

In our household we have two cellular telephones (one AT&T, one Verizon), two VoIP lines (one Spectrum, one Vonage), and the legacy landline which my father had installed in August of 1961.

The cell phones and VoIP lines all use NOMOROBO technology, and have minimal problems with unwanted calls, perhaps one call per day.
The landline (which my father refuses to have disconnected in case one of his old friends, most of whom have passed on, tries to call him) received between twenty and thirty robocalls every day, despite being on the DNC list.

During the election season the number was closer to forty calls per day.

Most cell phone carriers (more or less) effectively protect their subscribers from this annoyance, or at least make a game attempt.

Not so for the providers of copper land line service.

Copper landlines are essentilly the lines that provide service to our very rural parts of the US. These are places often without other service- be it cell service, cable (including internet), etc. Essentially in these areas it is copper landlines or nothing. It is not profitable to update these lines to fiber... too few customers.

When Ma Bell was broken up in 1984, AT&T in particular got stuck with a lot of aging infrastructure. By aging, some of these lines date back to the 1950s, some before. The Bell System operated as a legal monopoly to provide service to these types of rural places... places where there is no competition because of lack of customers. They are a cost sink. A cost sink that at the time of MA Bell was acceptable because, monopoly.

When issues such as providing "universal broadband access" come up, these telecomm companies normally come up to the table with a "proposal" to provide such services, if (and only if), they can drop 2% of their customers on aging copper lines.

And noting that many of these places lack alternative communication services, this leaves them with zero communication avenues for EMS or business services. These aren't just rural areas that have only whittlers either, but are heavily agrictural or forested. A lot of our food comes from these areas. Maybe not such a good idea to keep them from selling it to us.

Thank you both. That all makes sense.

My one thought as followup is that even on the cell network, the "you've stayed at one of our resorts in the past" call (I assure you I haven't) is making its way through the cell defenses several times a week and this has been going on for well over a year.

That tells me that either the company behind the call is very good at breaking through the network's defenses or the cell network (Verizon, in my case) cut a deal with them to let them through. Cynical - yes, but I wouldn't bet against it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've never had anything but a landline, and get robocalled maybe a couple times a month that I know about -- who knows how many times they call when I'm at work and not here to answer the phone.

Fairpoint, the successor to Verizon the successor to Nynex the successor to New England Telephone, has been trying to weasel out of the obligations it knowingly took on when it came into Maine -- vast swaths of the state are still dependent on copper for basic telephone service -- but the system is still very heavily regulated and price-controlled by our Public Utilities Commission. They've convinced the PUC to release them from the responsiblity of providing price-controlled POTS service in selected cities over a certain population, but Maine being what it is there are very few of those. My copper is safe for now.

 

[sheeplady]

I've always wondered if we had kept the Bell System intact past 1984 and tabled breaking it up- say until 2004- how different telephone and internet access might look- for better or worse.

I think that if politicians saw the Internet coming they would have held onto the Bell System and demanded Universal Access, just as they demanded it for copper POTS.

I can remember going to Sears in 1985, when the Bell System was first broken up with my parents to pick up my parents first "non-bell" phone: a Mickey Mouse phone for my bedroom, bought in part because I couldn't reach the phone in the kitchen to dial the operator if my mother fell off the scaffolding (she was stripping the outside of the house at that point, as she wanted to repaint that side before I went to kindergarten).

 

[LizzieMaine]

We wouldn't have what we have today without the Bell System -- I'd submit that Bell Laboratories was the single most significant fountainhead of technological advancement in the US during the twentieth century. The technology of today feeds off its accomplishments the way the fossil-fuel industry feeds off dead dinosaurs.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

City parking lots used to have kiosks where you could drop off film to be developed. You could usually pick up the developed prints there the next day. For obvious reasons, you don't see those any more.

 

[Zombie_61]

City parking lots used to have kiosks where you could drop off film to be developed. You could usually pick up the developed prints there the next day. For obvious reasons, you don't see those any more.

Ours was in the local Safeway market parking lot. It was more shack than kiosk, and more often than not you would get your developed film back with one or two photos missing. Oh, they'd print the photo you took of your own foot when you accidentally pressed the shutter release, but not the family photo showing four generations of relatives that was crystal clear on the negative. The person running the shack never had an explanation for this, and if you complained about it and demanded they print the missing photos they wanted to charge you extra for it.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^
Fotomat was the big name in that biz. Before it came along, you took your film to the drug store and they sent it off to the lab.

 

[Doctor Strange]

There was also a time when many photofinishers ran their own lab for b/w (*) and just sent out color film to big guys like Kodak, etc. I recall this clearly from my youth in the sixties: we had a photofinisher right down Broadway from our own studio in Yonkers, and he did all the b/w processing/printing (still a significant amount of the biz then) in house.

(* As folks here with old-school darkroom experience will agree, b/w processing is EASY - just three solutions, whose temperatures/times have some degree of latitude in getting good results. Both color prints and color transparencies require many more chemicals and steps, with very tight temp/time requirements. A much higher level of control is needed for correct results.

In our little studio, we always developed b/w ourselves. We tried color once or twice... and found it too difficult. Thereafter, our color transparencies and negs were always taken to pro labs.)

Of course, the introduction of "minilab" machines in the eighties changed this. Relatively small and idiot-proofed enough to install and operate in chain drugstores, color processing/printing was now a "one hour" affair with these machines. That is, until digital imaging swept it all away...

 

[LizzieMaine]

We always dropped off our film at the drugstore, which was a collection point for Bicknell Photo Service, a lab in Portland that did pretty much all the professional photo-finishing for Maine from the 1910s to the 1970s. A week later you'd stop into the drugstore to pick up your newspaper or a bottle of Va-Tro-Nol, and the clerk would hand you a little brown envelope with the flap tied closed with red string, and that would be your pictures. Every town had a drugstore or a newsdealer or a corner store with a sign on the door: "Bicknell Photo Service: Best Photos Sold!"

When the one-hour-processing companies came along that was something miraculous and unprecedented. We never heard of such a thing.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Of course, my experience was pretty unique, growing up in a working photo biz. We could shoot b/w film, process it and let it dry, then print the negs and dry the resulting prints in as little as a half-day. So I had something not too far from "instant" b/w results all through my childhood, when nobody else really did (apart from other folks with darkrooms, or Polaroid shooters). Color took longer because we took it to a pro lab. And the "pro" part was typically overnight service, unless it was a special rush job.

Ironically... I still shoot b/w film sometimes, but it can be months before I have enough exposed film to warrant mixing chemistry, and get around to developing and scanning the negatives. So now nearly everyone else is walking around producing instant images on their smartphones... and I'm waiting months for what I typically had in a half-day in my youth!

 

[tonyb]

When I was hired on at a small publishing company, back in the pre-digital photo age, we had about three times as much office space as we needed, because so much of the layout, etc. work that had been done with light tables and rulers and X-Acto knives and whatnot was now being done with these newfangled Apple Macintosh computers. And we sent our film to a camera store up the street, which had itself just recently invested in new processing and printing equipment.


This was in the waning years of the last century. That camera store went belly up several years ago. The publishing company is still in business, but it's a shadow of what it was.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Some of my earliest jobs - after working for my folks - were in the printing and typesetting field. In 1979, even though the type was coming out of a new computer system (*) on photo paper or film, all the compositing and make-up to prepare the offset plates was done on light tables with negatives, red lithographer's tape, and razor blades. Apart from generating the type, it was still a totally photochemical, analog process. All of that was eventually swept away by digital prepress systems - first expensive dedicated systems like Hell and Scitex, but soon off-the-shelf software running on Macs.

(* This was long before WYSIWYG systems, the typesetters were keying formatting instructions in right along with the text, somewhat like XML coding.)

As with photography, I've been involved in printing technology since I was a little kid (we made litho negs at my parents' studio for the local offset print shops; and I had two years of letterpress experience in graphic arts shop in junior high school)... and the massive waves of changes I've seen across these fields in my lifetime are mind boggling!

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^
I bet!

What little I learned about the technical aspects of layout, etc. is more than I ever really wished to know. Of the three publishing companies I worked for, I was happiest and did my best work with the one that drew the clearest lines between departments. Just let me generate the copy, please, and clean up what the other hacks send in, and let the artists do what the artists do and the ad people do what the ad people do. I didn't realize just how well run one of those companies was until I left it for a startup funded by a starry-eyed Microsoft millionaire who knew a whole lot less than she thought she did.

 

[Zombie_61]

Fotomat was the big name in that biz. Before it came along, you took your film to the drug store and they sent it off to the lab.

And that's who owned and operated that "shack" I mentioned. There was, and still is, a locally owned and operated camera/photo developing shop called Monte's in the "uptown" area, but they charged quite a bit more because they took the time to perform all of the "tinkering" that resulted in better quality prints so they were usually reserved for those "special" photos; no need to spend extra for a bunch of spur-of-the-moment snapshots that would be looked at once or twice and then forgotten in a drawer somewhere.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

I just realized that I meant to post this observation in the "Vintage Things That Have Disappeared" thread, but somehow posted it here instead. Oh, well.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, it did tick me off last year when I dropped off a roll of film at Wal-Mart and the pinheads managed to expose the whole thing trying to load it onto their machine. A whole summer's worth of pics down the drain. Bah.

 

[tonyb]

I just realized that I meant to post this observation in the "Vintage Things That Have Disappeared" thread, but somehow posted it here instead. Oh, well.

You must know by now that these threads do wander around a bit. I find our tolerance of that conducive to a more normal conversational flow. So it's cool in my book. Every now and then we get a self-appointed moderator who gets huffy about it, and then said S-AM is basically told to blow it out his tailpipe. I find that refreshing.

 

[Stearmen]

Murdered Out! Yes, you read that right. Apparently, it's when a vehicle is done in an all low luster black. Ironically, it traces it's origins back to the Ducati Motorcycle Company. Their customers, back in the 90s, were complaining that it cost to much to buy an already painted motorcycle, then take the tank and bodywork to be stripped and custom paint applied. So Ducati, a small company, ever mindful of their customer base, introduced a model with a flat black, that was easy to paint over. Of course, the customers liked the flat black so much, they didn't even bother to paint the parts. Ducati obliged in the next year with motorcycles like the Monster Dark. And the rest is really bad history!

 

[sheeplady]

I recently had some family (from the husband's side) over for an "after easter" dinner. I am trying to share some of my culture with my kids; I am the only family member on my side of the family. If they don't get it from me, they won't get it- I'm an orphan with no extended family. Much of my culture is Eastern European and Polish in particular, so I decided to try a more Polish meal. I served kielbasa (sausage), several types of cabbage, eggs, horseradish, pierogi, and egg bread. I haven't had egg bread since my grandmother died over 20 years ago, and I made it myself with the help of the kids. I also set out 13 dishes with snacks (fruit, veggies, chips, pretzels, dip, etc) before the meal, so they could fill up.

The family I invited over didn't even try to call things by their proper name that I used... even when the (well meaning) kids corrected them. They called the kielbasa sausage, my daughter would ask for kielbasa, they corrected her until she said sausage. There was a comment made from one guest to another that there was no protein for vegetarians, when I made a point of serving cheese pierogi, set out cheese and dairy-based dips before the meal, and served hard boiled eggs. (This family often serves just pasta for a meal.... no dairy or anything else except sauce.) I also gave them the menu when I extended the invitation.

I don't think any of these judgements were concious... and that bothers me more. I can deal with the "stupid slur" comments better than I can deal with hearing my grandmother's food isn't wholesome or worthy of being called by the name we use in this house. Its really trivial but darn am I hurt.

 

[2jakes]

I recently had some family (from the husband's side) over for an "after easter" dinner. I am trying to share some of my culture with my kids; I am the only family member on my side of the family. If they don't get it from me, they won't get it- I'm an orphan with no extended family. Much of my culture is Eastern European and Polish in particular, so I decided to try a more Polish meal. I served kielbasa (sausage), several types of cabbage, eggs, horseradish, pierogi, and egg bread. I haven't had egg bread since my grandmother died over 20 years ago.
I don't think any of these judgements were conscious... and that bothers me more. I can deal with the "stupid slur" comments better than I can deal with hearing my grandmother's food isn't wholesome or worthy of being called by the name we use in this house. Its really trivial but darn am I hurt.

You cannot control what others may say or do to you, but you can control what you can do about it.
It's sad about insensitive people especially in a family situation. I feel sorry for them.
I don't associate with them any longer. It may not be as simple in your case.
But I have friends to share with and we support and enjoy many things.