What's happened to Ma Bell?

We spent many hours on the phone and in chats trying to get a landline for our cabin in Pine.

What we realized is that nobody we talked to even knew what a landline is!  

We'd explain:  "you know, where a cable is run in from the street, and then there was a little box on the wall where you would plug in the cord from your phone?"

Besides the fact that everybody except one person was not a native English speaker, (so our most frequent question was:  "would you please repeat that?") they kept trying to sell us, instead, a "cordless" phone that would be connected to our WiFi line.  

We are wanting no signals of any kind coming into the cabin or being inside our cabin.  We wanted an old fashioned telephone.  (Hey!  We're old!)

Nobody could grasp it.  All we did was call and ask this question:  "Can we get a landline to our cabin that comes in from a cable from the street and is connected to a little box on the wall?"

They didn't even know enough about what that was to say:  "Sorry, no."  They all just referred to their cheat sheets, and they all said the same thing regardless of who we called. 

What we frequently got, when they had no clue about what we were asking, was them trying to sell us cell phone service....even though we had already told them we already had cell phone service.  They must work on commission.  

One person asked:  "Can I ask why you want a landline?"

----like it's their business.  This was the first question.  The next one was trying to sell us their cell phone service.

Here is an irony.  We can't get something that was common only a few years ago, but now DOESN'T EVEN EXIST.

But, our wonderful town of Pine still has Pony Express, from 150 years ago:

 

 This is just messing with our old landline minds.