Phone switchhooks must die, or: Any sufficiently backwards technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I've just come off an hour-long marathon attempting to call my grandmother, who is currently in the hospital after having fallen and broken her femural neck and her forearm. On that excursion, which I'll detail below, I realized two truths.

1. Phone switchhooks must become a thing of the past in all cases and applications.
2. Any sufficiently backwards technology is indistinguishable from magic.

So, let's see... How did this come about?

1. I call my grandmother at her hospital bed.
2. A minute or two into the call, she tells me the volume suddenly turned very low and she could barely hear me anymore.
3. I tell her to hang up the phone so I can try calling her back.
4. I hang up and call her again; the line is busy in all attempts over the next ten minutes.
5. I call the hospital's front desk, asking to be put through to the station my grandmother's in.
6. No one in the station picks up the phone for five minutes, while it (surprisingly, since a call usually gets disconnected after thirty to sixty seconds if it doesn't connect) incessantly rings.
7. I attempt to call the hospital's front desk again, but no one there picks up for five minutes this time.
8. I attempt to call my grandmother once more; finally, the call connects and I can hear her pick up the phone, but before either of us can say anything, I hear a Click! and the call disconnects yet again.
9. Surprise! For the next ten minutes, the line is busy.
10. I finally manage to get through to my grandmother again, and she tells me she's had the phone lying on her bed, waiting for my callback.
11. I realize that I'm starting to hate that particular hospital, because the only thing they'd renovated there over the past twenty years was the lobby area--which looks awesomly modern and classy and expensive--and every other area in the hospital, from the hallways to the elevators to the equipment in patient rooms, is stuck in the late 1980s.

The problem here: my grandmother'd had the same phone--a split-pea green rotary phone from Deutsche Bundespost (the state-owned telco that held the legal monopoly over the phone market until the early 1990s)--from 1985 until at least the late 90s. Then, someone had the bright idea of getting them a cordless phone. She had enough trouble getting used to new technology. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," said Arthur C. Clarke.

Well, you know what? After ten years or so of using cordless phones, which don't need that arcane leftover from Bell's days--the switchhook--her (rightful) assumption was that a phone call could be hung up on by pressing a button. Unfortunately, the hospital forgot to upgrade its phone technology after the last round of improvements, probably some time in the late 1980s. (They also forgot to pick up new TV sets after their last round of tech investments, which resulted in my grandmother not being able to watch the telly in her room, because the CR tube finally gave out on Wednesday of this week.) While other hospitals in town (I've seen at least two from the inside, because my grandmother ends up in the hospital once or twice a year because her doctors keep letting things slide for too long and desperately need that wake-up call in order to actually start taking her chronic ailments seriously again) have had digital phones with calling cards for years, this one sports a look that soaked up quite a bit of the functional philosophy of the notorious Siemens touch-dial phone my first cousin-in-law (once removed) designed in 1970. So the phone's got a switchhook. No phone should need a mechanical switchhook anymore today. Not even corded phones (and yes, I know many corded phones still have switchhooks--WTF?)!

And you know what? Technological memory doesn't work the way remembering how to ride a bike does. Back when I was a kid, I was a master of MS-DOS. I knew everything. Nowadays, after 16 years of using Windows full-time, I can barely remember directory and file management via the console--the only tools I can really still use are netsh and sc. For everything else, there's an MMC snap-in. And so it goes for my grandmother: after a decade of using a phone she can switch off and then leave on her coffee table without worrying if it's "on the hook" or not, she's absolutely stunned that phones ever worked another way.

Any sufficiently backwards technology is indistinguishable from magic. It's always good to remind oneself of that simple little fact: if an instance of some technology requires an extra step beyond what the current implementation standard requires, you need to give users a hint. A big hint. An unignorable hint. Or make it work like the accepted standard. And today, that's the standby button that turns off a device without requiring that extra step of mechanically cutting the power circuit.

I'm not completely sure where I want to go with this. I guess the one thing I'd like to get through is that places that do count on having older people and people who probably aren't really concentrating on using technology while being pain-medicated off the rocker as clients should probably make sure that technology is as easy to use as possible. If they can't even place a hint (a text: "Please place phone in cradle to end call" in a prominent place on the phone), get better phones that can place themselves in the "on the hook" state after a minute or two of non-voice audio or when the connection was cut--either is possible to implement with simple circuitry in the analog as well as the digital domain. Don't be cheap and only upgrade your lobby area so your hospital appears luxurious at first sight, leaving every other part of your facility with infrastructure from the dark ages of technology. And don't tell me there's no money--you managed to blow a huge wad of money on redoing the lobby and stopped right after the first-floor hallway with the principals' offices.

</rant>