Helene Lyons, who sells vintage phones at her shop, Remembrances of Things Past, in Provincetown, Mass., uses a touch-tone phone to get access to her automated voice mail. But she uses her see-through rotary phone from the 1960's to call into automated switchboards like customer service lines. She finds that she often reaches a person more quickly by waiting for one to come on, and she suggests that touch-tone users try this approach, too. Rotary phone users are somewhat surprised when they have to show young children how to use them. That happened to Rick Walsh, a broadcasting engineer in Hartford who has been collecting vintage phones for 25 years, when he installed an intercom system based on rotary phones at his friend's camp this summer.
Collectors preserve the artifacts of a time before touch-tone and cordless became the norm.
You'd have to see it to believe it. Channing Wilroy, an actor and rotary phone devotee from Truro, Mass., who has appeared in several films directed by John Waters, said that when Waters visited his house, he found the rotary phones unbearable. And it's not just true with the telephone. I don't think people used to mind waiting several moments for the vacuum tubes in their radios and TV's to warm up either. That would never be tolerated now.