Virginia Heffernan has a lovely essay in the October 29 New York Times Sunday Magazine in which she mourns the passing of the landline:
I started to distrust telephones the instant they stopped working. I can’t pinpoint when that was — the first time I “dropped” a call, or someone said, “I’m losing you” — and I don’t know why the telephone, the analog landline telephone, was never formally mourned. I do remember clearly what life was like when telephones worked.
The Touch-Tone keypad on the telephone in the image on the NYT web site is worth the trip just by itself. (Thanks to JR for pointing me at it!)