When I was a child, we didn’t have a phone for awhile. I don’t know why. People would ask for our number and their responses to finding out we didn’t have one ranged from blank confusion to assuming we were trying to scam them somehow. But once we got past that, we could still get what we needed because we were dealing with people (and frequently pen and paper).

(This was also back when, “Our system doesn’t let us do that” wasn’t an economically or socially acceptable response from someone representing a business or agency.)

Now we deal with machines for good and for bad.