That line belongs to Lily Tomlin, giving voice to her officious phone company switchboard operator. At the time when AT&T was a monopoly, the phone company didn’t have to care (like our government).

Back then, you couldn’t own a phone, you leased it from THE PHONE COMPANY. When the monopoly ended in 1984, people started buying their phones. Except for a few who didn’t know any better.

Lloyd Overlock never had much reason to think about his telephone. The 85-year-old Hermon resident just paid his bills and knew the service was there if he needed it.

But Overlock, who for five decades has been paying a monthly fee to lease his phone, found out recently that the arrangement is a pricey, outmoded throwback to the days of telephone industry monopoly.

“I don’t use it much; I just sit here and wait for it to ring,” he said Friday during a visit at the cozy home he built himself and moved into back in 1952. That’s the same year he got his telephone, a heavy, dark-gold contraption the size of a child’s shoebox, with a solid-feeling finger dial. It hung on his kitchen wall all those years — until last week, when his niece Roberta York was making one of her frequent visits from her home in Millinocket.

York said she peeked at a bill from AT&T lying on the kitchen table. As is the case with most area residents, she said, her uncle’s phone service is provided by Verizon, so she was curious.

“I said, ‘Uncle, what’s this?’ And he said, ‘That’s for my telephone.’ That’s when I realized he was still leasing his phone from AT&T,” she said. “He got that phone in 1952, and he’s paying $4.42 a month for it, every month.”

Right away, she said, she picked up the gold receiver and dialed the customer service number on the bill to cancel the service. The friendly operator on the other end attempted to dissuade her, offering her uncle a 20 percent discount off his monthly rental fee and reminding York of the benefits of leasing.

“She said that if something goes wrong with that phone, they’d have a new one here the next business day,” she recalled. “I was thinking to myself, ‘If something goes wrong with that phone, I’ll go to Wal-Mart and get one the next day.’ But I didn’t say it.” She just told the representative to cancel the lease, and then she drove to a local dollar-discount store and bought her Uncle Lloyd a new wall phone for $7. It plugged right in to the old connection and worked like a charm.

York said it troubles her that elderly people like her uncle get taken advantage of. The monthly lease doesn’t seem like a lot of money, she said, but it adds up.

“For some people, that four dollars could mean a gallon of milk or a prescription or something to eat,” she said.