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Yes, I'm this old
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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My dad used to speak louder when the person on the other end of the phone was calling from further away geographically. I remember coming home from school once and he was screaming into the phone because his friend had called from Canada.
Was your father a Navy vet? The Navy has/(had?) voice powered phones on the ships, so that was literally how it worked. The farther away the other phone was, the louder you had to shout.
That's interesting. He wasn't in the navy but his first job was passing tools to telecoms engineers in the 60s. Maybe they were using something similar...
The phones were powered by voice? Wasn't it just that the amplifiers weren't very good.
Technically yeah your voice has power because it's moving air around, but it's a microscopic amount of energy. If you hold a piece of paper up in front of your mouth and just speak normally it will barely move, even if you yell it hardly goes anywhere. There's more energy in a calm breeze.
Ex-navy electrician here. They use a microphone transducer to convert sound pressure from your voice into electric current. They convert it back to sound by a transducer at the receiver node. The Navy still uses it because it doesn't require any outside electricity which is prefect for emergencies.
Fun fact, one of the things we'd do to haze new recruits is to send them to the ICmen to ask for a sound powered telephone battery.
My dad still does this. He yells into the phone (on speaker) as if he was screaming for his life. He's a successful businessman whose sole job is to talk to people and somehow convince them to work together or win a project over. I don't know how he does this by yelling into his phone as if he was shouting at strangers to call an ambulance. He also has hardly any knowledge of English and his German really sucks, yet he mostly works with these two languages. I don't know how he makes it work. And he hates talking on the phone because it stresses him out. But somehow addressing the fact he is trying to make crocodile dundee hear him when he uses a phone doesn't seem to be the answer to his stress.
He grew up in a remote soviet village with like one phone for everyone. My guess is the connection back in the days sucked and he never adjusted.
Your dad sounds hilarious!
He is, in a very weird and awkward way. My favorite story is how he called home from a work trip (it was somewhen before the internet, late 90s/early 2000s) and just told me to put my mom on the phone because Gorbachev wants to say hi to her. I delivered the message, having no clue who that guy is but I guessed some former classmate, while my mom was losing it and totally froze on the phone. Turned out my dad randomly met Gorbachev at a restaurant, befriended him, got drunk with him (well, my dad doesn't drink, but the other guy), and then he was so eager to call my mother that they picked up the phone of the restaurant/bar in Russia and called Germany via landline. Both yelled their souls out on the phone, I'm not sure they would have needed a landline to reach us.
Years later they passed each other at the airport, my dad thought of saying hi, but assumed he wouldn't remember him. But Gorbachev turned around, yelled my dad's name, and hugged him.
My dad is really not a social guy and has no friends but business trips bring out a weird ass impressive side of him.
This is likely an unconscious throwback to his youth.
I grew up on an acreage that still had older phone lines. And long distance used to be super spotty at times. Speaking louder used to be literally necessary to get past the static and interference in long distance calls.
It's amazing how far communications have come even since the 80s when I was a kid.
Ok, but did he do that weird thing where he would wait to pick up the phone between rings?
Yes, he did!