Oct. 21, 1989, column by Susan Trausch 21 Oct 1989, Sat Sun-Journal (Lewiston, Maine) Newspapers.comFind our full archive of newspaper content at sunjournal.com/archives

It’s official. The government says we’re spending too much time on the phone.

What a relief to those of us who had the feeling we were spending too much time on the phone, but didn’t want to be the first ones to call it a national crisis with global implications that is sending society straight down the tubes – with a receiver in each hand and a call on hold.

Well, now we can say that if we want to.

Not only has the government spoken, but it has spoken on the front page of the New York Times. Lower righthand corner, Oct. 11: The Federal Communications Commission reports that between 1980 and 1987, the time Americans spent on the telephone increased from 3.017 trillion minutes to 3.754 trillion minutes.

Good luck to anybody trying to figure that out in hours. A press spokesman at the FCC says the agency always tracks this one in minutes and gets the data from phone bill records.

It’s a bunch. I know that. Also, it represents a jump of 24 percent, which is more than triple the U.S. population increase (7 percent) for the same period. Clearly, Americans would rather talk on the phone than have sex.

We knew this. We’ve been spawning gadgets like maniacs here. Answering machines, car phones, shower phones, cordless wonders, cellular devices, special lines open 24 hours a day, call waiting, call forwarding, conference calling, computer calling … call it off already!

But we can’t. No way. This is 1989. The wires are all connected and have a life of their own. Anybody who tries to yank out a telephone by the roots in a fit of pique is going to drop into a black hole of cable and get zapped to a satellite dish on Neptune.

So we just keep talking, talking, talking, often to ourselves.

Susan Trausch is a Boston Globe columnist.