Hello heartbreak, goodbye good old landline

I often wonder if there shouldn't be some sort of ceremony, a grand ritual for beloved soon-to-be-defunct tech, something involving fire and tequila and howling laments into the night mixed with lots of hugging and laughter and bawdry tales told by the hoary old-timers who remember it all, albeit hazily.

Currently marked for imminent obsolescence: the landline telephone.

What a time it was (the old-timers will croak), a freewheeling, rose-colored era full of grumpy Pac Bell repairmen and innocent prank phone calls, coupled with multihour chats until dawn with a new lover, sans the slightest thought of silly irritants like minute overages or random signal dropouts or hey wait a sec honey I'm getting a text message from Brussels and my battery's about to die and oh my God I think I just pressed "erase all numbers" by accident are you still there are you still there hello? Hello? Hello?

There will be anecdotes. There will be fond memories of, say, calling that beautiful blond girl from high school physics class and hearing her mellifluous absolutely angelic high school voice say "Hello?" and then hanging up really fast, breathless and riddled with quivering love, safe in the surety that she could never know who kept calling and sighing and hanging up because it was a time before caller ID and before instant callback and well before caller GPS tracking, well before everything changed. Again.

Ah, change. It's happening right now. If all forecasts and iPhone sales figures are to be believed, the landline phone, this ancient device of your parents' fondest memories, is going the way of the 8-track and the cassette, the pull tab and the teletype, the floppy disk and VHS and John McCain's brain and sad little girls named Edna Lou.

Perhaps you already know. Perhaps you're already one of the converts. Perhaps you have no idea what I'm talking about because you're about 22 and have used a cute pink Nokia since you were 4 and got your first domain name at 10 and you can't even spell Led Zeppelin properly, in which case I'm not sure I can speak to you ever again. Sorry.

No matter. The phone companies are adding mountains of wireless customers as fast as they're losing landliners, as millions of young whippersnappers switch to using their cell phones exclusively (or, more accurately, never order a landline in the first place) because, well, why not? This is the wireless age, Grandpa. Besides, whatever your cell can't do, Skype can. Or IM. Or texting. E-mail, even. Really, who needs a plug?

A psychological cushion

Truly, almost no one I know has a traditional telephone anymore, and if they do, they maybe only keep it around as a psychological cushion, a false comfort for when the apocalypse hits, perhaps remembering that crazy citywide blackout a few years back when suddenly all your gizmos went dark and you had to fire up all the candles in your house and turn on that portable AM radio to get the news and felt suddenly very cut off and isolated and sad.

And then you remembered, "Hey, wait a sec, can't I still plug this old $5 Radio Shack corded phone from 1987 into the wall and have it work just dandy because it requires almost no electricity at all? Sure I can." And you did. And you called your parents and they sounded relieved to hear from you and the world was less lonely. Amazing.

Personally, I'm getting ready. Gearing up for the transition, the letting go, the awkward switchover. It will not be an easy parting. My flat here in San Francisco is long and has many offshoot rooms, and so I have five little Panasonic handsets scattered throughout the joint, each waiting on its own charging station and each making it absolutely impossible that I won't be at least within crawling distance because, well, isn't that important?

OK, maybe not. But it's still an odd notion, switching back to relying on a single tiny phone and the deeply imperfect cellular technology that it runs on, and taking it with me into all those rooms, not so different than 25 years ago when you could get only so many phone jacks in the house and if you wanted to call you had to be where the phone was. This is the exact same thing, inverted.

The next wave

And what happens when the iPhone breaks? Or I lose it? Or drop it in this vat of red wine on my desk or hurl it at the wall in a fit of joyous disbelief after winning a Pulitzer? Instant isolation, that's what. Oh well.

My mental gyrations are, of course, irrelevant. There is no real justification for the cost of two phone numbers and multiple handsets anymore. The next wave is here. Wireless is the new e-mail. Which was the new fax. Which was the new teletype. Which was the new snail mail. Which was the new Morse code. Which was the new Pony Express. Which was the new cave drawing. Which was the new voice of God in your prehistoric head. Which really isn't all that different from a call on a Bluetooth headset. Full circle, really.

Another transition. Another tech wave, another soon-to-be-obsolete technology that once was king and is now relegated to cultural curiosity, niche product, footnote. Make a note of it? Sigh affectionately? Mark your calendar so you can look back someday and say you were there when it happened? Raise a toast and yank the cord and pray your next call doesn't fizzle and drop out just over that next hill? Why not?

-- Mark Morford columns with inset links to related material can be found at sfgate.com/columnists/morford.