‘Ready for Lunch? Over.’ Walkie-Talkies Make Comeback With Folks Stuck at Home

[ChrisSmolinski]

While attorney Eric Monzo took part in a bankruptcy-court videoconference last month, he kept an eye on his new link to the world outside the guest bedroom of his Delaware home: a Pokemon-themed yellow walkie-talkie.

A family friend gave his 6-year-old twins two of the push-to-talk devices last year, for a way to talk to each other from different parts of the house.

Now that the house is also an office, school and playground, thanks to coronavirus stay-home rules, he finds walkie-talkies are also the most efficient way to keep tabs on his children and vice versa. His daughter regularly radios in to ask her dad how he’s doing and to make sure he looks out the window to watch her on the monkey bars.

“Who knew that I would be using it?” said Mr. Monzo, a restructuring and insolvency partner at law firm Morris James LLP. “I am trying to juggle life and work and save businesses and save my family’s health, and we are finding a new way to communicate.”

The humble walkie-talkie and other push-to-talk two-way communications, whose consumer use seemed to be going the way of the transistor radio, are getting a new life in the midst of a pandemic

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ready-for-lunch-over-walkie-talkies-make-comeback-with-folks-stuck-at-home-11586707083

[Rob.]

That behavior is a pretty normal occurrence in my house.

[MDK2]

We just text on our phones in my house. But when I was growing up, my sisters and I all tended to keep to our upstairs bedrooms listening to loud music, prompting our dad to buy an old-fashioned bicycle horn and to come up with a one, two, or three honk code to indicate which of us should emerge for his message.