“We may be the only phone company in town, but we try not to act like it.”
That’s the closing line in this ad for the Lorain Telephone Company, which ran in the Lorain Journal on March 7, 1972.
Fifty years later, the Lorain Telephone Company is no longer in town. In fact, it’s not on this plane of existence.
It’s a quaint ad, promoting the availability of telephone service representatives who were happy to help you choose a color of a Starlight phone, suggest where to put an extension phone or answer questions about your bill.
I’m sure many of these concepts would seem bizarre to today’s youth. Cell phones are often the only kind of phone they've ever known.
Who could have possibly predicted fifty years ago what phones would evolve into today: a portable computer in your pocket that is arguably your most important possession? You need it for just about everything you do, and that’s the way Apple likes it. (I’m a Tracfone guy myself.)
Anyway, I’m not sure what goes on in the CenturyLink building on W. 9th Street these days, or if there is even a human body working there. There’s no helpful telephone service representative there, that’s for sure.
I’m one of the few idiots people still with a land line with CenturyLink. I’m in the phone book (just like Steve Martin in The Jerk).
But for some reason, although my Vermilion phone number is correct, CenturyLink prefers to publish the address from when I last lived in Lorain more than three years ago.
