@apc In the before-times, phones used to not be wireless AT ALL! They had these things called "cords" and did not have these "screen" things. Sometimes they had a dial the you spun around with your finger, making yourself dizzy looking at it.
Moreover, households tended to have ONE telephone! Each line was expensive, and hey why bother with more than one anyway? Stick it in the front hallway, that's surely enough for everyoe.
And nothing took more advantage of that than your romantic comedies, where "only hearing one side of the conversation" delivers more misunderstandings per capita than anything else. So today we start delighting in some of these ancientest and dumbest of phones! Our #AniMangaFoundIt starts in an even more ancient boarding house...