Sometime, probably close to 20 years ago, but perhaps more recently, you heard a dial tone for the last time and you didn’t even realize it would be.
I have a landline, I hear a dial tone every time I pick up the phone.
Low-key way of informing everyone that nobody ever calls your landline.
Or that they’re the ones making all the calls.
My work has landlines, so I still get to hear it
Same for the R2D2-56k gatekeeper of the internet; master of the slow reveal.
I have a captain crunch whistle so I hear it anytime I want to!
BZZZZT
That is a VERY powerful vibrator you have there. Not a bumblebee, is it?
You were one of those people.
It is still wild to me that a cheap toy was able to “hack” the phone systems back then.
On a similar note for parents: At some point, you did/will pick your child up and then put them down for the last time.
I heard it last night in a movie. From an actual phone, it’s been a few years, but less than 10. EDIT: actually, less than 3 years as I had to fax paperwork to get my internet. Japan!
if you have tinnitus it never really stopped
Sorry to nitpick… Tinnitus is more likely to introduce high-frequency sound than the 440Hz dial tone. If anything, that is the one frequency that old-timey phone techs would eventually struggle to hear…
Sadly, I had to fax documents recently.
My work uses VoIP and when I call anyone I hear a dial tone.
I heard one about a week ago
Sometimes I pick up the phone behind my desk and just listen to the dial tone. Having a voip line from my fiber internet provider is cheap. Sometimes I’ll use it to connect my old computers to the line and dial into the few remaining bbs.
My phone makes a dial tone the moment I press a single key on the keypad to make a call. 🤷🏻♂️
It’s not the same as picking up a landline; it’s just the phone app adding it probably to let you know you’re dialing.
Are you sure about that? Dial tone is a sound you hear before dialing, not the sound you hear when you press a key.
I’m old enough to know what a dial tone sounds like. On this phone’s phone app once you hit a key, it’ll make the key tone and then start making the droning dial tone sound until you finish dialing or hit the back button to cancel.
The only reason I can think of for them to put this in the app is to let you know you’ve got it open and some numbers have been pressed to prevent butt dialing. 🤷🏻♂️
My office phone has a dial tone. It’s VOIP but when you pick up the receiver it BOOOOOOOPs… So I think it was last week I heard one…
Hopefully not for the last time…
I listen to it every day at work when connecting to customers alarm systems.
Necromancer
I don’t know. I have several old phones and a touch tone dialing adapter. I like the experience. I can say with high confidence that I’ll hear a dial tone in the future.
Plus, watch any movie from the seventies through the nineties that includes a phone, and you’ll probably hear a dial tone.
