The Buckets by Greg Cravens for November 24, 2014

My college dorm in the mid-80s still had party lines — 4 rooms shared a line. Etiquette-wise, if you wanted to use the phone and you picked it up and heard someone else talking, you were expected to hang up and try again later. It was considered totally not-cool to just eavesdrop on someone else’s call.And if you were the one talking, and you heard someone else pick-up/hang-up the phone, the polite thing to do was to wrap up your call soonish, b/c someone else wanted the phone. When someone did not do that, the check-hangups began to get increasingly insistent, eventually more like check-SLAM-the-receiver-down!! If someone still kept yakking, you could holler into the phone, but it was considered extra-rude to verbally break into someone’s call. I was more likely to just go next door to their room door and ask them “get off the phone already!” At least I could do that, since our line was the four rooms at the end of a hall. Some people’s lines were four rooms that ran vertically through the 4 floors. That was a tougher situation for maintaining manners; since you probably didn’t even know the people who lived above or below you, on a completely different floor.