The Most Unfortunate Phone in the World

The MURAPHONE MP-801. Manufactured on May 2nd, 1983. It's a landline phone that doubles as a base unit for a wireless phone [originally included, though no longer present with this unit]. No indication what the 'MP' stands for, but a solid guess would be 'MURAPHONE.'

Thanks to some bewildering design calls, tech limitations of its era, and hapless circumstances throughout its long life, this individual device is a good candidate for the World's Worst Phone, or more generously, the Most Unfortunate. It was about $10 on eBay.

This became a running list of the phone's offenses and tragedies:

• Absurdly long antenna with no purpose, as the wireless phone is long gone

• No means to dock or charge the wireless phone, which instead came with its own separate charging cable and plug

• No letters on keys

• No star or pound keys, or functionality

• Green ‘in use’ LED continually flickers while phone is not in use

• Hot to the touch

• The thick cord has both a power brick and a 3-prong plug, possibly explaining the heat

• No means to be hung on a wall

• Smells like grandparent

• The user is meant to write their phone number directly onto the phone

• Foregoes a standard ringtone; the phone’s ‘ring’ is a series of extremely loud, long monotone beeps (confirmed by the manual to be a feature, not a bug)

• A previous owner evidently installed a custom mute switch to silence the ‘ringer’

• Cryptic yet needlessly thorough owners manual repeatedly stresses that the MURAPHONE is not meant to replace a standard landline phone

• For long distance calls, the manual recommends simply not using the MURAPHONE, to avoid the potential risks of overcharging due to misdials. It states that ‘MURA cannot be responsible for charges resulting from wrong numbers’

• The manual also admits that eavesdropping on private calls is all but inevitable, as conversations via the wireless phone are being publicly broadcast over 2-way radio

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Most of the buttons (plus the toggle) were strictly for connecting to (and from?) the originally included wireless phone, plus up to nine others (optional; sold separately).

Nothing for the handset to latch onto, and nothing on the base to hang on a wall. Probably for the best, as it's heavy as a doorstop.

Not mentioned or pictured in the otherwise ridiculously thorough owners manual, this mute switch appears to be a custom job from a previous owner, ever determined to work things out with this device.

It's a mystery why someone would go through the trouble of engineering what is ostensibly a telephone with no means of indicating an incoming call, rather than simply purchasing another, better phone.

Fully extended, the purposeless antenna is well over two feet.

This is the box, because of course it is.

Seems likely it was the custom mute switch person who sat down with a pen, determined as hell to make some sense of this thing.

Seems likely that the handset was tossed once its non-replaceable battery eventually gave out.

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I can't completely fault the phone's design or lack of foresight (star/pound keys weren't even necessary until the '90s). And the phone's "hook" (a landline phone... that also connects to a cordless phone?!) was evidently novel enough that the MURAPHONE could boldly proclaim itself "the most advanced cordless phone in the world."

Time has been outright cruel to this phone. It's aged terribly, but in an endearing way that encapsulates the zeitgeist of its day.

I enjoy imagining how the MURAPHONE came to be. What was its nucleus? Every thing starts with an idea. What was the original idea behind this terrible phone? How many people were on the MURAPHONE team, and how long did the MURAPHONE project last? Was it some Product Manager's pet project, their baby? When somebody made the deliberate design choice to swap a traditional ring for very long, loud beeps, were there high fives? Did the team throw a MURAPHONE launch party?

There doesn't appear to be much information on the long-gone MURA Corporation. It appears they were around from perhaps the '70s until at least 1990, and specialized in modest, unremarkable radio equipment. The physical address listed in the manual points to this equally modest, unremarkable building in Westbury, NY --

I wonder whose job it was to write that exhaustive owners manual, and whether they volunteered to do it. I wonder who made the last bad call that did the company in. Questions like these have concrete answers, but you and I will most likely never learn them. But I hope that just by pondering these trivial unknowns does a little right by the MURAPHONE and the people behind it. It's pushing forty, and it still works by design, mostly. It makes and receives phone calls adequately. By definition, doesn't that make it a perfectly fine telephone?

All of us are just doing our best with what we're given, and deserve to be given at least one shit about. The same goes for the MURAPHONE, and the same goes for the humans that history tasked with making it a reality.

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