John Manley, "The Lord of the Liver" | Sunday, February 12, 2012
How A 99¢ Telephone Made Me Healthier
“Why on the earth would you want that ol’ thing?” asked the cashier.
I had just plopped a used telephone from the 1980s on the checkout counter. It must have weighed about 5 pounds (if not 10).
“Oh, I know why,” said another volunteer at the thrift shop. “I was once visiting friends in South Carolina. There was this three-day power outage. All the new phones wouldn’t work. So AT&T was selling off those old ones like mad. They don’t need electricity to work.”
“Actually,” I said. “the main reasons I’m buying it is because there’s a lot of evidence that cordless phones cause brain cancer.”
As soon as I said that, the volunteer walked off. The cashier just said, “Oh, I don’t know about that. That’s 99 cents, please.”
Last thing people want to hear I guess.
David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and Environment at the University of Albany, had this say about wireless technology: “We can do nothing and wait for the body count. That’s what happened with smoking.” [1]
But that’s not the only reason Jonah (my 5-year old son) and I hunted down this “antique” phone at a back alley thrift shop that smelt of moth balls.
The number one reason was the price: 99 cents.
The phone does everything I need.
I can use it to call people.
And I can use it to receive calls from other people.
What more do you need?
Sure, I could have bought a “Motorola K301 Big Buttion Dect 6.0 Digital Cordless Phone” for $49.99.
Or I could’ve saved myself $49.
Saving money may mean more to your health than even avoiding electromagnetic radiation.
With the economy the way it is, money is a big stress factor.
Stress produces ill health.
Eliminate unnecessary expenditures and you automatically increase your peace of mind.
Most people hardly have any savings. They’re living from paycheque to paycheque. Yet they’re buying $49 phones.
That’s stress.
It’s not like I bought myself a rotary phone, after all.
Remember those? I lived in the 905 area code, growing up. That was a pain. You had to wait 9 seconds just to get the first digit to spin around.
So, it’s not like I’m being extreme. This is a touchtone phone. It’s not a tin can with a string attached.
More so, it has a REAL ringer. Not one of these digitized ringtones. When this thing rings you can hear metal clanging metal.
Jonah loves it. It’s installed in the office. He likes having me call from the home line to make it ring. Being blind, he can really appreciate the difference between a synthetic ringtone and a real ringer.
“But you can’t walk around the house with this thing,” the cashier at the thrift shop had also said to me.
Fine by me. Multi-tasking — talking on the cordless phone while you flip an omelette and paint the ceiling — just seems like more stress.
No way. I’m happy saving $49. I’ve no problem being forced to sit down and pay attention to the person I’m talking to. And why would I want to bombard my household with questionable electromagnetic frequencies?
Make life simple. Be a king!
John C. A. Manley
The Lord of the Liver
P.S. If you’d like to hear how my nifty 1980′s telephone sounds, I could record a short video of Jonah playing with it. If this interests you, send me an email. If enough people ask, I’ll record the video and send you a link.
P.P.S. Are cordless phones really something to be concerned about? Check out this article about the 2010 U.S. Senate hearing on wireless technology and brain cancer: Who Says Cell Phones Are So Dangerous, Anyway?
References:
[1] Mercola, Dr. Joseph. “New Law May Slow Cell Phone Cancer Epidemic.” Mercola.com. http://emf.mercola.com/sites/emf/archive/2010/03/27/experts-warn-that-cell-phones-will-spur-a-cancer-epidemic.aspx