撥 - Bo1 - Push Aside, Allocate, Batch, Stir

撥號 - Bo1 Hao4 - Push Aside Number — Dial a Phone

I’m not sure if 撥號 means to dial a phone because of the “Push Aside” meaning or the “Stir” meaning. I reallly want it to be “Stir”, I like the idea of stirring my numbers into the phone.

電話 - Dian4 Hua4 - Electric Words — Telephone

Jenny says she’s heard of 撥號 but it’s not a common thing to say, maybe old fashioned. Nowadays you just 打電話 - Da3 Dian4 Hua4 - Make Electric Words — Make a Phone Call.

撥號盤 - Bo1 Hao4 Pan2 - Push Aside Number Plate — Phone Dial

Today our neighbors down the street had a tag sale. We stopped by, intending just to use it as an excuse to meet them, but we ended up finding and buying something Jenny’s been searching for: an old fashioned (from 1962) big, black, heavy, rotary dial phone! For some reason, Jenny’s always wanted one, but they’re pretty hard to find. You can get a fake one, but they don’t actually dial, they have buttons on the dial. Ours dials! And it was 4 bucks. Dialing a 9 or 10 digit number (which you have to do just to call the next town over with all these crazy area codes they have now) really takes some work.

It has an ancient crazy connector, so getting it working wasn’t easy. It has three wires with U-shaped connectors on the ends: red, green, and yellow. The guy we bought it from works for the local phone company and assured us it would still work: all I had to do was unscrew any of our modular jacks, and I should find colored wires wrapped around screws inside. Connect red to red, green to green, and ignore the yellow wire, and it should work.

The first jack I unscrewed looked nothing like what I expected. Instead of any screws, the wires came in and went into something that looked very much like this, which I later found out is called a “punch down block” (I think). There was no obvious way to free the wires from the block, and even if I did, making the connection from the tiny wires behind the wall to the U-shaped wires coming out of the phone didn’t seem easy, so I moved on to another jack.

The second one was much more promising. There were green and red wires coming in, screwed down to connections that then lead to the modular jack. Yes! I quickly screwed the red and green wires in, and left the yellow one hanging. I picked up the handset. DIAL TONE! YES! I dialed my cell phone. dial. dial.. dial…….. dial… dial… dial……. dial………. dial….. dial…… dial…… dial…… waiting… waiting… some clicking noises… “Please do not dial the numeral 1 when making a local call.” Hang up, try again without the 1. (I can never figure out when you are and are not supposed to use the stupid 1. And I know the phone company knew what I meant, because of the error message! Why not just let the call go through!) This time… my cell phone rang! Yes! Pick up cell phone. Akwardly say “hello? hello?” back and forth between the two sets, and listen for the delayed, clipped “ello? ello?” come out the other end. Momentarily consider reversing one phone, and holding them up to each other to cause a feedback loop, just to see what would happen. Decide against it. Hang up. Now, to hear that nice old ringer: dial home number using cell phone. No ring! It’s not ringing! What’s wrong? Is the ringer broken? I bet it’s the yellow wire. I bet it means something.

At this point I hit Google, and read all about “tip” and “ring”, and a million how-to articles on how to “stick it to the man” by doing your own phone wiring, what all that stuff is in the phone company box outside your house, why “home run” connections are better, how to add a second line, everything but how to wire up a really old phone in a modern system. Finally I found one article that seemed to have the solution: some old phones have red green and yellow wires. To get them to work, just connect the red and yellow wires to the same post! Ran upstairs and tried it. Still didn’t work! At this point, I became desperate, and reckless. I called home from my cell phone, and while all the other phones were ringing, I took the loose yellow wire and randomly touched all the other posts. When I touched the one where the green wire was connected, the was a tiny spark, and the phone rang! Yes! So I made that connection permanently, screwed the whole connector box back into the wall, and now we have a working rotary phone! And, amazingly, all the other phones continue to work, as well as the DSL.

The phone feels really great, and the ring does sound really nice. It’s somehow much less jarring and piercing than a modern electronic ringer. But there is still a problem: since I made the connection directly, there’s no DSL filter. That means that the phone sounds really staticky. Adding one in is going to be tricky, since they only have modular connectors. That’s a project for another day…

You know, I just realized another benefit of this phone. Next time I call a place that has one of those automated “choose your own adventure” style phone menus, where you have to guess the right sequence of answers to get to the ending (speaking to a human), I can now legitimately bypass the entire process by taking the “if you are not calling from a touch tone phone, please stay on the line and someone will assist you” option!