美文赏析：我的座机情结_大学英语阅读

美文赏析：我的座机情结

They sounded wonderful. When direct long-distance dialing first became available, my mom would call her brother in North Dakota, and they’d spend an exhilarating minute telling each other they sounded as if they were in the next room. Then they’d hang up. And it was true. People did sound as though they were in the next room.

That’s because their voices didn’t have to guess where they were going. They got to travel inside honest-to-goodness enclosed wires the whole way, completely out of the weather, and they’d come out all creamy on the receiving end. Nowadays your voice has to find its way through the air and bump into mosquitoes and hurricanes and such, and by the time it gets to your friend’s phone it sounds as though it’s coming from the bottom of a box of crackers.

But it’s considered an improvement because we don’t have to be tethered to a wall, even though that wouldn’t be the worst idea for a lot of us.

Anyway, back then, if you heard a little crackle on your phone, you’d call up The Phone Company and they’d send out some guy with his name stitched on his shirt to polish it up for you free of charge. The wires were all tucked away inside the house through one neatly caulked hole in the siding. Now the landline brings in crunchy noises, the sound of squirrels chewing, and a background layer of generalized infrastructural tinnitus. You don’t report any of it as long as you can still make out the conversation, because it will cost you a hundred bucks to have some repairman poke a toe inside your house. If you can keep him outside, he’ll haul out a bunch of new wire and staple it in careless loops to the side of your house like bunting. But it does sound marginally better than the cellphone, because there’s no delay.