What people get used to

  Been doing some work today at home and was reminded about what people put up with and get used to. They then become so used to it when things improve they complain and don't like it. What do I mean by this then let me explain.

  The software I write in its simplest description handles telephone/voice calls. There is a lot more to it than that but it can be boiled down to that as a rough description. Therefore I know quite a lot about how telephone calls work and their various foibles. Think about when you are on the telephone with someone and neither of you are speaking at that moment. You will always hear a slight hissing in the background yes? That is called "comfort noise" and is actually deliberate believe it or not.

  To get to the explanation of why this is you need to go back to the old analogue phone lines that were basically just two wires connecting one phone to another via various mechanical switched exchanges between the two. As a result of this analogue signal going along the wires clearly there would be some interference along the way, hence the slight noise that is always present. Fast forward a bit to the 80s when these old electromechanical exchanges were ripped out and replaced with fancy new digital exchanges. The main reason for this background noise went away and people didn't like it. They assumed that because there was no noise on the line the line was dead since that was one way you knew you had a dead line, it was completely silent. So what did people do? Obviously artificially inject noise so that people did not freak out and were happy with this new technology.

  Stupid huh? It gets worse. Let us fast forward to the days of VoIP that we have now where telephone calls can basically travel purely over the internet (in fact current cell phones work on the same technology as well FYI). In this case the voice travels back and forth as pure packets, no potential for interference at all and with the right codecs and bandwidth the voice quality can be vastly superior (another story for another time as to why telephones sound as bad as they do). Again what happens when people stop talking. For bandwidth reasons you don't sent packets containing nothing you send a CNG packet (comfort noise generation) to tell the far end to generate noise and stop sending packets until the person speaks again..... Really silly huh? All this just because people are used to something.

  Basically what I am saying here is that people got so used to something that was not very good. Then when something better came along it was artificially gimped so that people would not complain and accept it. Even though there are better ways of doing things people still stick to what they are used to rather than accepting something new and improved. It can explain a lot of how people are incredibly resistant to change despite the fact that their lives would actually improve if they would accept the new.