Sell Phones
Sam Aurelius Milam III
I have an old-style telephone answering machine in my office. It doesn’t have a USB port or any wireless capabilities. The only connections that it has are one for power, one for the old-style land line, and one for the telephone. I turned off the ringer in the telephone, so I don’t have to listen to it ring. I know that I’m receiving a message when I hear somebody leaving one. If I want to talk, then I can pick up
the telephone. If not, then I can erase the message. On Tuesday, July 19, 2022, I walked into my office and saw that the message light was blinking on
my answering machine. I played the message. It wasn’t an
incoming call. It was a recording of a conversation between the owner of the property where I’m presently staying, and one of
her neighbors. I brought the owner to my office, where she listened
to the recording and confirmed that the conversation had taken
place an hour or so earlier, in her dining room. How the conversation
got from her dining room to my answering machine was a mystery. We pondered the situation. There’s an internet modem in her dining room, a few feet from were the conversation took place, but it didn’t seem likely to me
that an internet modem would include a microphone. However, my land line goes through the internet modem, so we considered it. The problems with the theory were that, if the modem listened to the conversation and sent it to a remote location, via the
land line, then why would my answering machine have interpreted it as an incoming call, and recorded it? If the modem sent the
message via the broadband connection, then why would whoever was at
the remote location send the message back to me, via the land line, for
my answering machine to record? The theory didn’t make any sense. Across the dining room, through the kitchen, around a corner, and through a door, there’s an Alexa.
Those things are always listening, but this recording was loud and clear, without any echo or fading such as might be expected when a microphone is a long distance from whatever is being recorded.
The Alexa connects to the internet modem, but the same questions apply.
Why would my telephone answering machine detect an outgoing transmission from the Alexa and record it as an incoming call? If the message went out via broadband, then why would whoever was receiving it send
it back to me, via the land line? Neither of the two theories made
any sense. We wondered if maybe there was a hidden listening device somewhere in her dining room. I made some silly joke about speaking clearly into the flower arrangement, the electrical outlets, or the smoke alarm. After some consideration, we wondered about the neighbor. If she’d been carrying her cell phone in her hip pocket, then maybe she butt-dialed the land line telephone number during the conversation. It seemed unlikely that she’d just happen to butt-dial that particular number, out of all of the numbers that she probably has in her cell phone, and that she’d dial it at that particular time, but we asked her anyway. She confirmed that her cell phone had been in her pocket during the visit. She checked her record of calls and, sure enough, her cell phone had made a call to the land line on the date in question. The record of calls didn’t give the time of the call, but it was still a reasonably believable and mostly innocuous answer to the mystery. Of course, butt-dialing a cell phone
isn’t necessarily innocuous. Imagine butt-dialing your wife,
during a rendezvous with your girlfriend. Imagine butt-dialing
the secretary, while you’re describing her to your buddies at the
gym. Imagine butt-dialing the auditors, during a meeting of the board of directors. A cell phone should always be disabled when it isn’t actually being used. To rephrase an old proverb,
there’s many a slip twixt lip and hip. My cell phone sits on a shelf in the
room next to my office, with its battery removed. I install
the battery and turn on the cell phone only if I actually need to use
it for something. I'm usually capable of getting through the day without it. Somebody else who does the same thing with his cell phone will probably make the same discovery. The fact is that cell phones
aren’t as essential as we’ve been led to believe. They certainly
aren’t as essential to the people who have them as they are to the marketing
swindlers who sell them.
| September 2022 | Frontiersman,0c/o 4984 Peach Mountain Drive, Gainesville, Georgia 30507 http://frontiersman.org.uk/ | Page 1 |
Thus, the rule of non-intervention in the affairs of other states is a well-settled principle of international law....
