Ranting Stan's Irrational Hatred Of The Week: Cordless Phones

Anyone who has been following this blog for a while will know I like to do a sort of "series" of posts. I've tried things as diverse as poetry (not too popular) and classic cars (very popular). I enjoyed doing them enormously, but they were very time consuming as posts go.

Normally my posts are fairly ad hoc affairs which I write while I think about them. Something piques my interest and I think "that will make a good idea for a post" and off I go. They are rarely planned and rarely researched and I like to think that gives each posting a sort of organic nature - although others will probably think they are just inane ramblings.

But the classic car and poetry posts required a lot of thought and planning (believe it or not) and I just don't have the time to devote to those sort of posts anymore. That's not to say I won't post more poetry or thoughts on classic cars again - I will if and when I get the time - but I didn't want to not have any serial posts at all.

So I tried to think of something I could write a series of posts that wouldn't take too much time, but would still kind of fit with the general theme of my blog. Being a right winger I am often accused of having countless "irrational hatreds" of various things, most of which I neither hate or, if I do, the hatred is far from irrational. But that's not to say I don't have things which I do hate rather irrationally - so what better than a series of posts about those things?

First up is the cordless phone. Now, in theory, these seem like such a great idea - a telephone which isn't connected by a piece of cord to a wall thus enabling you to wander around and get on with other things while chatting on the phone. Great, eh?

No - they are a pain in the ass. Why? Well, first of all there is the fact that the last place you tend to find the phone is back on the charging base - especially if you have kids. Kids have a habit of chatting for long periods of time and not putting the phone back where it should be. Consequently, when you get a phone call you spend the first thirty seconds of ringing time trying to locate the bloody phone!

Quite often you can hear the ring vaguely, but it doesn't seem to come from any particular place. Eventually you find the phone stuffed down the side of the sofa or under a pile of clothes in the kids bedroom.

Then there is the problem of trying to locate the phone when you want to make a call. Because the phone isn't ringing it is even harder to find. The charging base usually has a "page" button which causes the phone to emit a pathetic beep for a few seconds, but by the time you move towards the vague, far off beeping sound it has stopped - so you go back to the charging base, press "page" again and try once more .... before giving up and embarking on random search of the house.

Eventually you find the phone and make your call - only to find that the bloody thing runs out of charge 30 seconds into your call! And so you return the phone to the charging base with the idea of trying again in an hour only to find in the interim that someone has used the damn thing and left it somewhere else again!

So that is why I have an irrational hatred of cordless phones.