Recently, I have come to assume that any call to my landline is from a telemarketer or an automated call from Terminex, letting me know that our regularly scheduled pest-extermination service will occur on its regular schedule. So I usually ignore my home phone.

Orlean uses a mundane, contemporary annoyance—the landline’s transformation into a conduit for telemarketing and automated service reminders—to sketch a small portrait of modern communication fatigue. The humor comes from the specificity (Terminex, the “regularly scheduled” call about a “regular schedule”) and from the resigned logic that follows: if the phone no longer signals human connection, it becomes rational to ignore it. Implicitly, the line comments on how technology and marketing have eroded trust in everyday channels of contact, shifting the home phone from a social instrument to background noise and prompting self-protective disengagement.