Remember the days of party lines? The phones we used in the 1960’s weren’t quite this vintage, but they were rotary dial phones, and there was a human switchboard operator connecting calls to the right networks. We had party lines, where we shared the signal with a neighbor, to save on the cost of the phone service.
If you picked up the phone to call someone and your neighbor was on the line, you would hang up and wait awhile if you were polite. If you were mischievous, you’d stay quiet and listen until they heard you breathing and told you to hang up. We still had to pay our own fees for local, long distance and collect calls. We didn’t have unlimited plans. You can google it.
