"Num-bah, Plea-yiz?"

     I have had occasion to use my employer's fancy in-your-computer telephone system a few times recently (instead of my own cellphone, for which they pay a nice chunk of my bill) .

     It is about as unlike using a telephone as using a telephone could be.  I grew up on rural telephones, not too far removed from party lines.  I grew up with limited bandwidth, optimized for speech; with a certain amount of whooshing white noise in the background, not to mention blips and bleep from crosstalk, sometimes even distorted speech from another call muttering in the background.  And I grew up with "sidetone," which is the faint sound of your own voice from the earpiece of your phone, which you don't notice until it's gone.

     Every bit of that is gone with the app they use.  You can bring up a conventional keypad on the screen to dial numbers with, but the sound from the headset is pure hi-fi.  And the connection is so quiet that if you're in a still-enough place, you can hear your own heartbeat during pauses in the conversation.  What you won't hear is your own voice.  Maybe there's an adjustment for that; I haven't looked, but if I'm going to use this thing much, I'd better, because it's distracting.

     Living in the future is okay, but I'm glad I'm not a big desk telephone user.  The modern version is making me feel like I may have time-traveled a little farther than I'm comfortable with.