The Telephone Handset

With mobile phones such as smartphones now the norm, landlines—known in Japanese as ieden—have become far less common.

Yahata Sushi has a landline because it is a business, but since I do not use one privately, all my communication is done on my smartphone.

I was shocked once when I asked one of our part-time staff to call a taxi from the restaurant’s landline, only to be told they did not know how to use the telephone.

But I was equally surprised when even the fourth-generation owner, who had used nothing but landlines for many years, completely forgot how to use today’s telephone.

The other day, I transferred a call from elsewhere to the fourth-generation owner on the cordless handset. He apparently thought it was a smartphone, and simply kept tapping at it without even trying to hold it to his ear.

When I asked him, it turned out that he normally uses the speakerphone even when talking on his smartphone, so he had been trying various ways to put the cordless handset on speakerphone too.

Needless to say, he was convinced that the cordless landline handset he was holding was a smartphone.

We somehow got him to hold it to his ear and took care of the matter, but until quite recently—before he started using a smartphone—he had been perfectly capable of using a cordless handset!

Habit can be a frightening thing.

By the way, the fourth-generation owner does not use email or LINE, but he does all his daily news checking and searching on his smartphone.

He loves dictionaries and used to immediately open one whenever he needed to look something up, yet he has made such a complete transition.

And he is 90 years old, after all.

I am sure he will continue mastering new tools from here on out. 😆