For a year or so, I've been hankering to get a new phone for our living room. We've had a succession of cheap cordless phones, which look ridiculous, don't work very well and cause big angry tirades from Dad about how you can't just walk off with a cordless phone and then leave it somewhere. What if we have an emergency? How would you like it if I took your Nintendo game and walked off with it and you had to look for it for an hour? You don't think I have anything better to do? Huh? (Sorry. I get carried away, but to be fair, the other week, I finally found the cordless phone in the backyard.)

What I wanted to get for the living room then, was one of those big, fancy, fake antique black phones, the kind that look like the old dial phones but have push buttons on the outside and modern electronics inside. You see them in those stores at the mall where they sell stuff you can decorate your home with so it will look like you're classy and people won't notice how worn out and shabby the rest of your stuff is. The idea is that a cool lamp or a big pillow from Pottery Barn can distract you so much that you forget the dog chewed the arm off your couch.

On the plus side, a big old-fashioned phone would make our living room look a little classier, and because it had a cord, no kid could walk more than three feet without getting whiplash. On the minus side, those impressive looking phones were pretty expensive.

After a few weeks, though, I found the solution. My wife and I were wandering through one of those antique/junk stores when I came across a real old phone, one of those black Bakelite ones with a rotary dial. At 15 bucks, it was worth the risk that it might not work. I brought it home and, using my tools and some tape, spliced the wires together so it would work with a modern plug. When I picked up the receiver, surprisingly enough, I got a dial tone. I put it on the table in the middle of the room and stepped back to admire my ingenuity.

My 12-year-old daughter came into the room and stared at it.

"What is that … thing?" she said, curling up her lip. I told her it was a phone. She looked like she didn't believe me.

"It's pretty ugly," she said.

" I got it," I said, "so you kids wouldn't walk away with the phone all the time."

She gave me a look that really meant that she couldn't wait till the day when all our calls were long distance ones. She asked how it worked.

"You pick up the handset," I said, "wait for the operator to answer and then say real loud, ‘Clara, connect me to KL5-1234!'" She picked up the receiver, waited for a minute, then frowned at me.

"You're such a jerk," she said. I walked out of the room.

I came back a few minutes later. She was still sitting at the phone.

"I figured out how it works," she said. "You put your finger in the little hole, and turn it around this dial, and do it for each number you want to put in. It takes a really long time, but it works!"

"I know," I said. "That was the way people dialed when I was a kid. Isn't it kind of cool?"

She smiled for a moment, then shook her head.

"No!" she said, "It's actually kind of dumb. Why didn't you just get a real phone?"

As I walked out of the room, she called out, "Hey! How do you 'Star-69' when you want to find out who called?"

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