So day before yesterday I dropped the receiver of the kitchen phone onto the floor. It bounced one little teeny bounce against the linoleum, and I picked it right up…and although it showed no outward signs of trauma, it has refused to work ever again.

No dial tone. Nothing.

Now I don’t get this. Phones used to be tough. They were made of hard substances. Why, they were even throwable in a passionate argument. You could hurl a phone across the room at your boyfriend, have it hit the wall, make a big hole and shatter a painting there, careen off the coffee table, and then still call your friends on it later to discuss whether you should break up with the guy. Clearly, American phone technology is not going in a good direction.

But what is truly bad about the death of my kitchen phone is that it means that I have to once again go into a phone store and explain to some fourteen-year old clerk that, no, I don’t want a phone that can do Fantastic Tricks, like take pictures and remember numbers and summon the internet and, worse, live off of its cradle. I don’t even know what all phones can do these days–and tell me this, is there anything that can make a person feel older than trying to talk to a young person about telephones? A young person who is shaking his head and looking at you pityingly because you truly do not GET IT that phones are not meant just for talking on anymore? 

What I need–and I feel I’ve tried numerous times to explain this to a disbelieving adolescent–is simply a kitchen phone that will stay on the wall, a phone that I can add a 50-foot cord onto so that I can drag the receiver over to the couch and lie among the pillows, sipping tea while I talk. That is all. I have plenty of portable phones (two, actually) that are now in various locations throughout the house, beeping sadly that they need to return to the Mother Ship, which I currently believe exists somewhere in the spare bedroom underneath a pile of college-student laundry. These phones, adventurous and free-ranging as they are, not only have to be tracked down for every telephone call, but then they make the caller sound as if he has just gone into a far-away cave in Afghanistan and then taken a huge bite of someone’s down comforter before dialing. 

So yesterday, feeling brave and bold and ready to strike out on my own with this phone-buying business, I marched into my local little hardware store, which is the kind of place where you can still find Old Guys Who Know Stuff sitting around chatting over the advantages of copper pipes, and I directed myself straight to the phone section. No youths showed up to explain to me the virtues of new phones. And unlike those huge box stores, this store had exactly two phones to choose from: one that sticks to the wall and stays there, and one that is portable and probably has a down comforter balled up inside its voice apparatus.

I bought the old-fashioned wall one, proudly, spending all of $7.99, and then I came home and hooked it up to all the little wires and stuck it to the wall.

And…well, it will not work.

It turns out that I’m a little less old-fashioned and unpicky than I thought. This poor old phone is so untalented that it doesn’t have a plug for the caller I.D. screen which is mounted just underneath it. The phone rings, and the caller I.D. screen just shrugs its shoulders and says, “Don’t look at me. I don’t know who’s calling. This phone doesn’t link to me.”

Also, its cord is stuck into it permanently, so that I can’t replace it with my luxurious 50-foot variety for walking around the premises.

So now I have to go back, and this task seems even harder than before. I need, I will explain, a stick-on-the-wall, land-line phone, with a caller ID hookup, and a removable cord. It doesn’t need memory, it doesn’t need redial, it doesn’t need to know how to mix a martini or show a DVD.

Just a phone–and it would be nice if it wouldn’t plunge, suicide-style, to the kitchen floor.