PLAYTHINGS

“I’d like to wish everyone a Happy New Year--with the exception of the man who invented the telephone.”

For many people, that December, 1891, greeting from Mark Twain, published in the New York Sun, rings as true now as it did in the infancy of America’s most ubiquitous appliance. With advances in phone technology, many Southern Californians are beginning to wonder if any place is safe from the device’s incessant ringing. According to telecommunications entrepreneur Dan Golden, the love/hate relationship we have with the telephone is nothing new. Mark Twain’s humorous pieces complaining about the infernal instrument actually helped popularize it.

“Instantly, everyone wanted phones,” says Golden, 42. Golden understands; he’s got a lot of them now. When Golden was a child, he stuttered--except when he talked on the phone. Thus a career, and a hobby, was born. A trouble-shooter at Ma Bell for 15 years, he started his own telecommunication-systems company five years ago. Throughout his career, he’s collected more than 400 phones, including early models by Bell and Thomas Edison; his San Marcos home is crammed with everything phone-y, from 19th-Century phone booths to promotional items.

“The early phones were used as business tools and rich people’s toys; they were status symbols, a lot like car phones and pagers are today,” Golden says. With these liberating items, of course, have come costs. High on Golden’s list of telephone technology run amok are: auto-prospectors--those pesky recordings that solicit many thousands of numbers at random--and caller ID, a device that lets the party you’re calling read your phone number on a small display and that, Golden says, can be hooked into a personal computer to access the information you filled out on your phone application. The public should take back the phone lines, Golden says. “These kinds of abuses of phone technology are not inevitable. If you are unhappy about them, write your elected officials.” Golden also encourages people to demand more helpful options, such as priority ringing (a distinctive ring for friends and other important callers) and call return (which returns the call that disconnected just as you picked up the phone). “It’s like the science fiction movie where the apes are pushing the car down the street because no one ever showed them how to turn it on--that’s how most people today still use their telephones,” Golden says.