For one month, my household was part of a test-market survey on telephone behavior. For one month, we tried out Voice-Activated Dialing. Having Voice-Activated Dialing meant that instead of dialing the phone, we gave it orders. "Call Mom," a kid would bark into the telephone, and the phone would then dial my wife's work number, which had been programmed into the phone's brain.
I didn't know our telephone had a brain. All I knew was that one cheap phone had a favorite radio station. It picked up stray radio signals and played them every time you picked up the receiver.
The kids and their mother, however, knew how to give the phone orders. They taught it to memorize a list of frequently called telephone numbers. They instructed the phone to recognize "Mom," "Dad" and the names of their friends, and to link these voice commands with phone numbers.
At first, bossing the phone around was cool. Our kids enjoyed telling the phone to call their friends. Soon, knots of neighborhood kids were gathered in our home, telling our phone to call their homes. Our kids had put these numbers in the phone's brain. It was big-time entertainment.
After a while, however, the phone thing began to get on my nerves.
First there was the problem of having that "Ready Lady" lurking on the line. The Ready Lady was my name for the female voice that came on the line shortly after you picked up the receiver. "Ready," she would say. This was supposed to be my cue to tell the Ready Lady to "Call Pizza Man" or whomever.
I never got comfortable with the Ready Lady. I would forget she was there, and when I picked up the phone, she would startle me. Instead of my giving her orders and making her jump into action, she would say "Ready!" and I would jump with surprise.
The Ready Lady also didn't get along with our telephone answering machine. One afternoon, the two of them got into a voice-activated dust-up, which was recorded by the answering machine. It began when a person called our home, got our answering machine, and tried but failed to hang up cleanly, making a clicking noise. The clicking noise summoned the Ready Lady. "Ready," she said and awaited instructions. Our answering machine told her to leave her name and number. The Ready Lady translated this response into a request to "Call Mom."
My wife wasn't in her office, so the Ready Lady ended up talking to the Patient Lady, my name for the female voice on my wife's office phone message system.
The Patient Lady calmly instructed the Ready Lady to "please leave a message." The Ready Lady said nothing. This lack of response began to honk the Patient Lady off. She gave the Ready Lady a couple of chances to "please leave a message." Then the Patient Lady cut the Ready Lady off at her electronic knees. She hung up.
From time to time, the Ready Lady would also get confused by the pitch of our voices. Like a dog that responded only to its master's voice, the Ready Lady responded to the pitch of the voice of the person who taught her to, for example, "Call Mom." If the teacher's voice was a tenor but the voice now asking her to "Call Mom" was a bass, the Ready Lady would get flustered.
Once when I told her, in my deep voice, to call "Call Mom," the Ready Lady matched my deep tones with those of my 14-year-old son and instead called one of his teen-age friends.
Sometimes you had to fool the Ready Lady by talking in an altered voice. This meant that one minute a person was trying to issue commands in a voice like Miss Piggy's, and the next he was trying to mimic the bass of Barry White.
The kids found this amusing. They wanted us to keep the Ready Lady and her many quirks, even if it meant paying for the service. At one point during our month of free service, a survey taker asked my wife many questions, including how much we would be willing to pay for the service.
My wife replied that we were not ready to pay for a device to make phone calls. Shortly after that, the Ready Lady left our house.
Since then our phone life has gone back to normal. Our kids have stopped bossing the phone around. From time to time, one of their friends, recalling the halcyon high-tech days of old, will pick up our phone and order it to call their home.
That is when I have to tell the visitor that at our house, we now make our phone calls the old-fashioned way. We dial them.