For those of you who sneer at landlines, ever been in a power outage?

One year, we had a ice storm that knocked out the power to our neighborhood, among others. I used to sit on the phone with my girlfriend as we read to each other by candlelight. As a result, I do still have a corded phone that I can dig out and plug in if the power was out and the cell battery drained.

Hope it warms up for you soon!

Is there an actual question here?

“For those of you who sneer at landlines, ever been in a power outage?” That seems like a question to me.

I figured it’s unlikely that someone here wouldn’t have been in an outage at some point, so I wasn’t sure.

What type of landline do you have? My phone works when the power is out.

That’s what she meant, I think… that a landline is the only thing that works in a power outage. Assuming you don’t have a cordless phone.

Which means, of course, that I’d be screwed, since my landline only has a cordless phone.

(edited)

It’s very uncommon here in Texas , only when hurricanes come about(damn Ike) I used my car to charge my cell phone. I don’t have a land line .

@Scamp. A phone with a cord. I should have mentioned that. Some people in cities use only their cells. I have several cordless phones that become useless.

When the power is out during this severe winter, I have to stay home to tend the wood-burning stove so that neither Milo nor I freeze to death. How long do you have to recharge a cell phone in a car?

Hmmm, that must have been a major outage then, because corded phones normally depend on such a small amount of power that they usually still work when the power is out.

I use both a landline and a cell.

You might want to invest in some of these

edit: I just re-read and saw that your phones are cordless. I always keep a corded phone in the hall closet for use during power outages.

@fireside; the most useful purchase I made this winter was a quality miner’s lamp, from LLBean. You wear it and thus can forget the candles and the wax drips and have two hands free.

I have been giving them to all my local friends as gifts. (It does nothing for the hairdo, however.)

I would only go sit in my car for about 30 min listening to the radio. It would charge to at least half way.

I do not sneer at landlines. The chances of me ever being in an ice storm are minimal, since I’d never choose to live in a place where that would be likely to occur. And there is no dearth of cell towers where I live. Hmm. What was the question?

@Scamp and others; I meant that my one phone with a cord has been a god-send during the power losses (one recently for 6 days.) I was not able to get a clear enough signal on my cell phone even to report the outage to the local utility company.

@Scamp; the slippers are funny but I will stick with flashlights and my miner’s lamp. Is there nothing that someone won’t try to sell?

On 9/11, all the cell phone lines were unavailable so I used a landline to call my parents and tell them I was okay.

@fireside: Landlines were jammed on 9/11 too. I’d never experienced that in my life until then. You always got this message “circuits are busy.” Scary.

@poofandmook – i was on 42nd street, but I must have gotten lucky since i was able to get three calls in before leaving my office

For some people in rural areas they are obviously still necessary, but for others they are relics of the past. Why would I want to pay $30 a month for something I never use except in the very unlikely event (couple times a year… maybe?) of a power outage that lasts more than a couple hours? If I lived out in the boonies without reliable cell reception then yeah I’d have one, but for a lot of people even close to a city there is really no reason to have them in my opinion. I haven’t had a landline for at least 4 years, and have not missed it once.

I haven’t had to use my insurance policy in years either.
Glad to have it though.

@StellarAirman: And I pay $25/month for the 50 minutes on the cell phone that I use only for emergencies, such as a car crash. Last month, just to make sure it was working, I called the cell phone on my landline and left a friendly message.

@fireside Again it depends on the situation I suppose. I can always easily walk to a neighbor’s house or a pay phone if for some reason my cell phone doesn’t work, my car is dead, my laptop battery is dead, etc. Again if I was in a rural area it would matter more.

@gailcalled I guess you’re covered in all situations then. :) I just pay for my cell phone and feel like I get the same coverage, at least where I live. If I were to get a home phone, it would be a VoIP phone, which is cheaper and easier. Of course it works over the internet so the cell phone would still be my emergency phone.

I guess it’s handy but I just couldn’t justify the extra expense for how often I was using it.

Until there is conclusive proof one way or the other, this is why I will keep my landline. Also my daugther lives 1000 miles away and we talk for an hour or two each day, so it’s more econimical for me to have the landline.

power was out for two weeks in December here in NH. The cell phone worked fine during that period of time. It all depends on whether the generator is up and running on the nearest tower when your power goes out. Maybe your’s just ran out of gas.

I got rid of my landline during the primaries. I got po’d at the endless and repeated campaign calls. They averaged 6 per day, sometimes twice that many.

who needs the aggravation? love the cell phone, and I don’t get that extra buzz and gibberish in the background that I used to get with a landline.

@bristol: You have towers that have generators that kick in? Nice.
Do you have a home generator to charge the cell phones?

@gailcalled, funnily enough, my wife is an English teacher and she says a lot is two words. I have never seen anything you wrote in need of correction. This is a red letter day. Love you.

@steve6: And sloppy is one word. Thank her. The Amish women always made one deliberate mistake in each of their quilts, believing that God only is perfect. It’s a pity that I can’t use that as my excuse. Ask her how she handles the “hopefully” vs. “I hope” issue. Does anyone care about that any more?

You are right about the Amish. As usual, you have responded with the grace and intellect we have come to expect. You are still our favorite. Keep up the good work. I have now co-opted my wife to read fluther and soon I hope she will start an account. She is a lot like you. We need more of that. I’m lucky, I have her every day.

We had an epic ice storm in nearly the entire state of Kentucky a couple of weeks ago followed by a wind storm that finished the job. Thousands were without power and heat and many still are. I lost electricity for three days but my cell phones still worked (I went through some serious fluther withdrawal). I was able to access fluther and e-mail with my cell phones but my router wouldn’t work. How does the back-up power supply work for a computer? My landline had been downgraded from long-distance to local calls only to now only 911 service but it still worked. I strayed earlier from the thread so I thought I would try to answer the question since it was most prescient to this part of the country and an unusually good question. Also, I was able to charge a few things with the lighter outlet in my car. We were reduced to listening to the radio for entertainment and emergency information, reading by candlelight, heating the house with a kerosene heater, and staying warm at night with marital love. It was a little like camping out with all the comforts of home. Cooking on the kerosene heater was trying at best and showering in ice cold water did not happen.

This guy seems to have found the sloution by combining the two!