WASHINGTON (AP) – With his ambitious plans for a nation-wide high-speed rail program continuing to be stymied Republicans refusing to support new investment initiatives, President Obama announced a new program that he hoped to make the centerpiece of his 2012 campaign: high-speed rotary-dial telephones.
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During a Rose Garden press conference, Obama introduced his innovative agenda.
“Since the push-button telephone was invented by Al Gore in 1963, progress in the area of phone number selection systems has completely stagnated,” said Obama. “Due to the monopolistic greed of Big Keypad, American are left with no choice in how they select remote communication digits. But this nation must change to embrace the future by letting go of the past to embrace the even more distant past.
“Recently I suggested that our nation’s intercontinental train network could be improved by investing hundreds of billions of dollars to make America’s trains go a little bit faster than they did in 1962. The visionless Republicans in Congress said ‘up yours’. That’s why I’m now proposing we make America’s rotary-dial phones go a little bit faster than they did in 1962.”
“New technologies invented by the Dialyndra company can enable us to dial a ‘9’ or ‘0’ in only 2 seconds instead of the 3 seconds it used to take, sharply reducing wasted dialing time and providing the average American up to 10 extra years of free time that they could be better spent with their families, or waiting for medical treatment under Obamacare.”
During the question and answer period following the press conference, President Obama suggested that his inevitably successful high-speed rotary-dialing program would likely be followed by other time-saving technology initiatives, such as the 9-track tape and the 34-rpm record.
I can visualize Mr. Obama demonstrating his new phone using his middle finger. And it gets stuck. And then he blames Republicans for being anti-Science!
Er…shouldn’t that be a 34 1/4 RPM record? Also wasn’t there talk in the halls of the energy department of subsidizing Solyndra’s developement of photovoltaic sundials?
The idea was rejected on a party-line vote. Ar ar. Most young’uns probably won’t get that. Okay, I’m leaving now.
Another win for the auto industry hobby lobby. Who needs another mode of transportation when you already have it all, and more, in today’s distraction packed pod bullet mind snatchers.
Les – get which? “Party-line” or “ar ar”? Growing up in the 70’s, I was exposed to both.
Ah, yes — the days when Robin Williams was more like Groucho Marx instead of Karl Marx, we marveled as Barnaby Jones talked on a bleeding-edge mobile phone the size of a shoebox, and Ellie May was younger than Granny. I can hardly wrap my mind around that last one.
Harvey,
I know I’m nit-picking, but, hey, phones are what I do. That said: It takes 1.0 seconds to dial a 0 on a traditional rotary phone. Each digit is a pulse, each taking 0.1 seconds. I guess you could make it faster, but then the math gets fuzzy.
Thanks for the laugh. “Big Keypad.” LMAO (When I was a kid, we called that “Ma Bell.”)
RJ – I hope you’re not questioning President Obama’s figures. That would be very unpatriotic of you!
But yeah, it’s been so long since I’ve used a rotary that I’d forgotten how long it took, and I was too lazy to Google it.
Curse IMAO’s intelligent and technologically-savvy readership!