 The ultimate irony of the phone companies was a special thing called comfort noise generation. If you are a phone engineer, you know what I am talking about. This is the most ironic thing ever. After years and years of people my age being used to their phone lines sounding like all the time, when we started having cellular telephony and digital phone lines that were perfect, they had no noise. The moment the other person stopped talking, what you would have was complete silence. So you are like, oh, okay, I guess they hang up. They didn't hang up, they are still there. There is just none of the... So then the phone companies invent the most brilliant technology ever, which is comfort noise generation, which is a device that sits on your end of the phone, and it looks to see if the connection is still open. And if it is, it whispers in your ear just to make you feel comfortable that the other person is still there.