Mobile phones are so much better than landlines, except . . .

It's been about 15 years since Mrs. Brad and I got rid of our landline telephone due to persistent telemarketers and our realization that no one would call us on it.

We'd been using our cell phones for years when we literally pulled the plug on our home phone.

Like 99% of Americans, we don't miss landlines, but sometimes, when I get particularly wistful, I think back to the days way before mobile phones and realize there is some romance to the old landline days. The old landline days, before persistent telemarketers became a thing.

It may be a misty water-colored memory, but there are some things that we've lost with the switch to 100% mobile phones.

Mysterious callers. I never had caller ID on my landline (for much of my life, caller ID didn't exist). The result was a mystery that is probably inconceivable to Gen Z: The phone would ring and you wouldn't know who it was. Maybe one of your friends? Maybe (in my case) one of your sisters' friends? Maybe your school? In a house with multiple children (four in my case), there was always a rush to answer the phone to see who it was. A mystery!

Knowing people's numbers. How many phone numbers do you know? For me, the answer is zero, because, like you, everyone I call is listed in my contacts. If not, I punch in their number once, then add them to my contacts.  But I bet you can recite your home phone number from when you were a child. You still know it! Think of all the phone numbers you remember from when you had to dial them. When I was a sports editor, there were probably 100 phone numbers (from family members to friends to coaches to random sources) I could dial from memory. Now? There are zero. All that memory space is now taken up by passwords.

Deciding how long to wait before hanging up. This was particularly true before answering machines. You call someone's house and the phone rings. And rings. And rings. Do you hang up after five rings? Eight? Ten? I was taught to hang up after four, which seems impatient. Now it's not an issue. You go to voicemail after the number of rings the person picked.

Dialing challenges. Comedian Louis CK has a bit in which he jokes about how much he used to dislike people who had an 8, 9 or 0 in their phone number because you had to dial them and it took too long. A dial! You had to put your finger in a hole and spin it, then let it return before dialing the next number.

Wrong numbers. You occasionally get the wrong numbers now, but it's almost always because someone changed their number. In the old days, you'd dial the wrong number and someone would tell you, "You have the wrong number." Occasionally you'd dial it again because you thought you may have misdialed and you'd get the same person, who would be irritated that you'd called again. Oh, the golden days of random wrong numbers.

Now we don't have to remember any numbers or dial our phones. We rarely get the wrong numbers. We always know who is calling us.

It's a much better world and we wouldn't go back. But you have to admit: Phone dials were a pretty interesting technology.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.