Seinfeld had an episode about cell phones, though.
I don’t remember the exact plot, but I think it was Elaine called somebody about something serious, like expressing condolences for a death or something, and she called from a cell phone while she was out and about, instead of calling from a land line at home. This was seen as a faux pas.
My memory was that she had bad reception, but that the call wasn’t cut, and when she hung up, she thought she had done a good job until corrected by Jerry. But I haven’t seen this episode in over two decades probably, so my memory isn’t going to be exactly right.
That’s because cell phone audio quality in the analog era was shit. Knowing that you’d be giving condolences with a hissy, staticky, distorted voice is kinda rude when a landline payphone isn’t that far away.
It was more that the person you were calling meant so little to you that you made the call while you were doing other things. Back then calling someone was almost like meeting them for coffee, often you would pre arrange the rough time you would call, and you were both engaged in the activity because you had to be at home sitting next to the phone. There was a certain effort to it that would seem lacking if you just could pull out a phone while you were walking down the street.
In the early 2000s I was still arranging landline calls ahead of time with my friends because you couldn’t use the internet at the same time as the phone.
A good portion of houses in my country never received a telephone line. Straight from arranging calls between phone booths to mobile.
Before 1989, the state monopoly had an installation backlog of several years (you could only get a line fast if you were high up in the party or had friends at the telco), high monthly fees and was woefully behind on tech: there was no digital voice equipment on the whole network, while the US’s Bell trunk network had all-digital audio by 1970. Even until like 1980, in regional towns of 30k-50k, they required you to speak to operators for out-of-town calls. After 1990, the company privatized but it was still prohibitively expensive to get a line set up, as so much money needed to be spent to belatedly bring the network into the digital era. The monopoly ended around 2000 and prices went down but by that point, people saw the dawn of mobile and didn’t want to pay for a new phone line anymore.
Seinfeld had an episode about cell phones, though.
I don’t remember the exact plot, but I think it was Elaine called somebody about something serious, like expressing condolences for a death or something, and she called from a cell phone while she was out and about, instead of calling from a land line at home. This was seen as a faux pas.
A non 212 phone number also a faux pas.
That sounds vaguely familiar… did she have bad reception or something and her condolences came across as insulting as words got cut
My memory was that she had bad reception, but that the call wasn’t cut, and when she hung up, she thought she had done a good job until corrected by Jerry. But I haven’t seen this episode in over two decades probably, so my memory isn’t going to be exactly right.
That’s because cell phone audio quality in the analog era was shit. Knowing that you’d be giving condolences with a hissy, staticky, distorted voice is kinda rude when a landline payphone isn’t that far away.
It was more that the person you were calling meant so little to you that you made the call while you were doing other things. Back then calling someone was almost like meeting them for coffee, often you would pre arrange the rough time you would call, and you were both engaged in the activity because you had to be at home sitting next to the phone. There was a certain effort to it that would seem lacking if you just could pull out a phone while you were walking down the street.
People weren’t still scheduling calls in the '90s. We had answering machines and even voicemail by then.
In the early 2000s I was still arranging landline calls ahead of time with my friends because you couldn’t use the internet at the same time as the phone.
A good portion of houses in my country never received a telephone line. Straight from arranging calls between phone booths to mobile.
Before 1989, the state monopoly had an installation backlog of several years (you could only get a line fast if you were high up in the party or had friends at the telco), high monthly fees and was woefully behind on tech: there was no digital voice equipment on the whole network, while the US’s Bell trunk network had all-digital audio by 1970. Even until like 1980, in regional towns of 30k-50k, they required you to speak to operators for out-of-town calls. After 1990, the company privatized but it was still prohibitively expensive to get a line set up, as so much money needed to be spent to belatedly bring the network into the digital era. The monopoly ended around 2000 and prices went down but by that point, people saw the dawn of mobile and didn’t want to pay for a new phone line anymore.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JW2Jf29hlXA
From the finale episode
It was the episode where Elaine gets a cellphone, and I think it was about the importance of when to use the cellphone.