It Never Hurts To Have An Old Phone

By Sean Aune | Jul 28, 2008

I was prompted to write yesterday’s post, Electronics And Storms, because of all the storms and flooding we’ve been having in my area. Well, one important thing I forgot to talk about was phones.

While we have discussed the wonders of VoIP before, and people have cordless phones coming out their ears, all of these items are useless in a power outage. We lost power for approxiametly an hour last night, and while I have an old style phone in my house, we do not have one in the warehouse for our company, and we also do not get cell reception inside of our metal building. While I was able to use the old phone in the house to call the power company to report the outage, I had no way to reach my parents who were spending a late night in the warehouse. I finally drove up to the building in the downpour to check on them and bring them some flashlights.

We are digging out an old phone immediately for just such an occasion, but it is always good to remember that just because technology does make our life easier, it doesn’t necessarily solve all of our problems. If you do not receive good cell reception in your house, it’s always a good idea to have a traditional, non-electric phone, somewhere you can easily access it.