I suppose my pet peeve is.....the demise of Western Electric.....
For the younger folks, Western Electric was, for nearly eighty years, the manufacturing division of AT&T. In short, they built telephones.......billions of telephones over eight decades, and EVERY ONE OF THEM was designed and manufactured so that virtually every person could carry on a conversation over their product, reliably and understandably.
Yeah, they were ofttimes clunky, ugly, and not exactly state-of-the-art, but they worked well every damn time that you used one, and it was not uncommon to find one still in use that was over half a century old.
Today's telephones are garbage!
I really don't care who makes them, in at least 75% of the phone conversations that I encounter, the instrument on the other end either garbles, overmodulates, undermodulates, distorts, attenuates, or otherwise turns normal speech into something that is barely intelligible. It doesn't matter whether the phone is a landline or cellular, whoever is making them has no concept of what a phone is supposed to accomplish.
And don't get me started on VOIP.....
(/rant)
doc