I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset

Summary

The meeting stakes are high when you can get hung up onAs you may remember, or completely not know, I have a bit of a fascination with old rotary phones. Occasionally, when people learn about this fascination, they donate their old rotary phones to me, so I have ended up with a small collection. The other thing I have a fascination with is meetings. Well, I say “fascination”, but it’s more of a burning hatred, really. One day, a few months ago, I was in one such meeting, as I have been every day since, and I jokingly pretended to get irate about something. One of my coworkers laughed and said “I bet if this were a phone call, you’d slam the phone down right now”, and a dread spread over me. Why didn’t I have a phone handset I could slam down? Had I really become a corporate husk of my former, carefree self, puppeteered by the vicissitudes of capitalism? “No”, I decided, “because that sentence doesn’t even make sense”. I did, however, have a phone I could use for this project, 30% of the knowledge required, and 100% of the underestimation of how hard the other 70% would be. Armed with all these numbers, I quickly started to try to figure out how I could do this. The phone I used (artist's depiction).The phone The phone I used is an old Siemens rotary phone, pictured in the image to the right. That image is actually not a photo of the phone, but ChatGPT’s best attempt at one, because I’m too lazy to try to find where I put the phone to take a photo of it. Rest assured, though, the image is almost exactly what the phone looks like, except with a bit more 8 and a bit less 3. The good thing about these old phones is that nothing is soldered to anything else, which makes it possible to modify them without making any permanent changes to the phone, something which I really wanted to avoid. I don’t really think it matters much, but I don’t like breaking/altering these old phones at all. I prefer to make reversible changes where I can, and luckily the phones allow that. The ...