An old invention that hardly anyone uses now is the landline telephone, the kind with a curly cord that sits on a table in the hallway. I'm forty-two and I run a small tailoring business in Faisalabad, so I remember when having one was a big deal.
When I was a boy in the late eighties, our family waited nearly two years to get a connection. Once it arrived, the phone was almost like a member of the family. It had a little crocheted cover, and relatives from the next street would come over to make calls. You'd book long-distance calls to my uncle in Dubai, and everyone would crowd around and take turns shouting down the line.
People stopped using it mainly because mobile phones became cheap and practical. Once you can carry a phone in your pocket and send voice notes for almost nothing, a landline seems pointless. Many families, including mine, just let the bill lapse and the line was eventually cut.
I have quite mixed feelings about it. On one hand, mobiles are obviously far more convenient, and my business depends on them because customers message me measurements and photos. On the other hand, I'm a bit nostalgic. The landline brought people together physically. A call was an event, and you actually paid attention because it was expensive. Nowadays we're reachable every second, yet I sometimes feel we communicate less meaningfully. My children laugh when I describe dialling with a rotary wheel, but I think they've missed something rather special.