I Like Things to Work!

Back around 1996 I bought this phone from Design Tuscano. I think I paid around $200 for it. I bought it for several reasons. I liked it. It went well with the decor of the house and, since I had a couple of room mates at the time, it was not a phone that you can talk on comfortably for hours. The handle is heavy and it will not sit in the crook of your neck very well. If at all. It is also a good item to throw at bad people of you can disconnect it first!

Sometime in 1997 I bought this phone at an antique mall for $60 and spent two days trying to figure out how to rewire it so that it worked. It still has the original 100 year old wiring. I got it to work perfectly after inspecting the refurbished phone's inner workings but since it is all original the sound is not great and it sounds like I am speaking down a tube to someone on the other end. Which in reality, I am. Someone once told be that I sounded like I was "far away" and since they were calling long distance it was true. I was far away!

They worked great for years. Take forever to dial a number and we hardly use them but they are very useful if the power goes out. Our cordless phones need an electrical socket in order to work. Cell phones require charging and I don't own a cell phone. In fact, I owned a cell phone once back in 1988 and it looked like this:

 

The little hand held ones that fit in your pocket cost around $2000 at that time. I didn't need a phone that badly.

Anyway, all was well until we switched our phone and internet over to ATT U-verse last year. The phones ring when someone calls but they could no longer dial out because the new equipment doesn't recognize Decadic dialing, otherwise known as Pulse. This bugged me. If we lose power, which we did in 2013 for three days, we have no readily available way to communicate except that I keep an old touch tone phone hooked up in the basement. This is so I don't have to run through three rooms and up the stairs to get to a ringing phone!

Well, one day I Googled "Pulse to tone converter" because there had to be a way to make these things work. I found this site which sells the little device pictured below.

These ship from Australia and cost $50 with the shipping. These are designed to plug into the phone line directly but since I have two phones, I did a little wiring magic in the basement where my phone lines converge and routed the two lines that my phones are on to this so that now they work once again and I am a happy camper!