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09 September 2013

It occurred to me today that I couldn't tell you when the last time I heard a dial tone was. Can you?
A dial what?
posted by pjern 09 September | 19:22
A what tone?
posted by Eideteker 09 September | 19:44
Oh, cut it out y'all.

My office phone has a dial tone.
posted by JanetLand 09 September | 19:53
I never use my office phone but we do dial into the conference call system every morning for our standup meeting and that system has a dial tone.
posted by octothorpe 09 September | 20:29
My office phone has the tone too.

I never thought about it before, but they must have created the dial tone intentionally to offer some feedback so that you knew you had an open line. If you just picked up a phone (landline) and heard nothing, you would not be sure if you just had a dormant connection or the line was open. It is a cool information-science sort of thing.
posted by Miko 09 September | 20:51
I have a land line at my apartment so I've heard it in the last month. I got a cool old phone for it at a garage sale. It has a squat yellow base and flat black handset.
posted by rmless2 09 September | 20:54
Yeah, I had to get a landline because I have no cellular signal where I live. I will occasionally forget to hit stop on a phone call. It still exists in the wild.

Now why do we still call it 'dialing'?
posted by Splunge 09 September | 21:13
I'm sure it was at work but I'm not sure when. Maybe the last time I had a conference call with other people which was a few weeks ago?
posted by bluesapphires 09 September | 22:40
My dial tone changes when I have voice mail. You just reminded me to check it and I had 2 messages. (This is a Fios feature)
posted by Obscure Reference 10 September | 08:09
Yup, dial tone on our landline phones at the office (which are now linked to our computers, totally bizarre) and at home.
posted by bearwife 10 September | 17:57
Every time I use my home phone, which is at least once a day.
posted by Thorzdad 11 September | 07:23
Roku channel recs || Let me tell you about my friend, Jeffrey.

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