Deal With Broken Phones the 'Green' Way

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The corded telephone in my home office began misbehaving about two weeks ago. The experience I had calling its maker Thomson S.A. (TMS) about having it repaired has been a lesson in disposability.

It showed me how hard it is to be an eco-conscious (or simply thrifty) consumer who buys less, keeps stuff longer and doesn't consume for the sake of it.

I was in the kitchen, some 30 feet from the office, when the phone began emitting static-filled staccato sounds. After a few days of lifting and dropping the receiver, turning the speaker-phone on and off, unplugging and replugging it, and letting my husband go through the same motions, I decided to call the company for help fixing what seemed to be a short in the speaker.

The phone carries a General Electric (GE) logo, but it's made by a division of Thomson, a French company.

My best guess is that I bought it in 2003, which would be light years ago for many electronic devices, but not telephones. From my point of view, this phone isn't meaningfully different in features or capabilities from those that Thomson is selling today.

I wanted the customer service people to tell me what they thought the problem might be, if I could fix it myself or if they had an authorized repairperson who could.

Alas, the help desk rep wasn't a true techie who understood phones. Clearly following a script, she wound her way through advice for a bad phone line (I reminded her that the noise happened when the phone wasn't in use), and for static on a cordless phone (I reminded her that it had a cord). She suggested unplugging it for 10 minutes (I told her I'd tried that). Out of options, she asked how old the phone was. I told her. She told me that since the phone is out of warranty, it would be more cost-effective to buy a new one than to fix it.