Smartphones and dumbphones and landlines... Oh my!

What I wouldn't give to not have to carry a smartphone around! Very few are the instances where your school or work doesn't require you to have a 2FA app, or be in constant communication through apps like slack or groupme, or at least email. I already have a cassette and CD Walkman for portable music. People are even going back to iPods to replace spotify. As for navigation, I am perfectly fine with printing directions from mapquest and ditching google altogether. I feel a weight lifted off of me and I'm so much happier when I can vacation with the piece of mind that I don't need to be constantly checking my phone for notifications. My first love was the era of flip phones like Blackberry or the Motorola Razr. Unfortunately, that only lasted a few years before everything became a touchscreen. Several years after that, once I moved out to my own apartment and paid my own internet bill, I found out that they still offered VoIP service which functions just like a landline. Do you remember landline phones? You didn't call a person, you called a place- "The Smith's residence," or something similar would be said when the phone was answered. I remember the fear I felt when I called a friend's house and their mom or dad would answer, then I'd have to ask if I could speak to Johnny. So I bought a nice "wireless answering system" off ebay and plugged it into my modem. It was only $20 a month for the home phone service and $35 for the phone itself. It records messages and my outgoing message to a micro-cassette. It has features, such as remote control of the answering machine from the handset, wireless intercom with the handset, built-in hold music, and you can check your messages from any other phone by calling and entering a pin! After I gave my friends the number for my landline, there was nothing better than coming home after a class or grocery shopping and seeing I had a message waiting to be played. Of course, it was often "Hey, I guess you're not home. I'll try your cellphone." but the friends that did adhere to the larp would wait patiently for me to get home and call them back. To satisfy those that wanted more immediate responses, I briefly researched if I could get old pagers to work on modern cell service and modern pagers, but it ultimately wasn't worth the hassle. Anyway, I'm still trying to balance compromises of both new and old phones.