Bremsstrahlung

It seems that many people these days do not bother with landline telephone service anymore, preferring to just use their cellular phones. I can see the logic in this; if you have a phone that works virtually everywhere, including in your home, why pay for another one that only works in your house? However, this situation does not apply to me, as the cellular reception throughout the apartment complex where I now live is abominable.

For this reason, I have arranged for landline telephone service, which although pricier than I'd like, has been satisfactory¹. My parents were so kind as to buy a telephone for me; the one they found happened to be a "Model 29265 Trimline Memory Phone", trademarked General Electric, but designed by Thomson Inc. The phone is nice enough; it could place and receive calls and even has built in caller-ID. I've found only two features that I dislike with this phone: The first is that it is too easy to jostle it and cause the switch hook to open and possibly immediately close again, especially when moving the phone to better read the caller-ID to see who's calling. This has the effect of forcing one to deal with the call, having 'answered' it or seem to have answered and then hung up immediately. The second is that neither of the phones cords, wall to base or base to handset is replaceable, and both are a bit short for my liking.

So, my phone wasn't perfect, but it got the job done. Then, in the course of the changing of seasons, we had a period of a few days here in which the air was excessively dry. I was getting highly unpleasant static shocks off of almost everything; my clothes, my metal laptop case, light switches, and so on. Before long, it was my customary time to call up my parents, so naturally enough I reached for the telephone, only to receive another shock. In a suspicious correlation the phone's caller-ID screen went out at the very same instant. After some grumbling and shaking my numbed hand, I seized the phone firmly and picked up the handset. The usual dial tone was present, so I started to dial my parents' number, except that the button presses produced no feedback beeps. Somewhat perplexed, I dialed the whole number, but the dial tone continued unchanged.

To the best of my determination, the static discharge passed through the plastic casing of the handset, likely via the seam where the two pieces of plastic were snapped together, and fried the electronics inside, destroying the dialing and caller-ID circuits. The microphone and speaker appear to have been unaffected, and I can still use the phone to receive calls. I just can't place calls.

All of the above was a few days ago; today I went and purchased another phone, perhaps regrettably of the same brand². I've set it up and it now works fine, so I went ahead and disassembled the old one a bit. Unfortunately, there's no way to open the handset, where the problem seems to be, without breaking the case, but I did poke around inside the base. I found it very solidly constructed there, as the small circuit board that houses the main telephone logic is held in place by:

• One screw
• Two plastic snaps
• A Piece of masking tape, which also serves to keep wires tidy
• Being soldered directly to the battery terminals
• And last but not at all least: copious amounts of hot glue

Too bad they were so usy making sure nothing rattled in there that they couldn't protect the electronics from common static discharges.