The traditional telephone is a device which separates the sense of hearing from the sense of seeing. Thereby, it questions the most fundamental categories of human sense-making: time and space. The following essay takes this destabilizing impact of the telephone as its point of departure. Basing its investigation on the notion that literary texts frequently imply norm deviations of some kind, it analyzes the role of the telephone in the implied worldviews of three short stories whose ‘mechanics’ depend on the telephone. Although the texts discussed differ substantially in terms of their historical and socio-cultural implications, the telephone emerges as a highly ideologized (everyday) object in all of them. It is deeply intertwined with the respective texts’ implied norms. In particular, it emerges as an item indicating epistemological or ontological cracks in the respective worldviews. In ‚Look at All Those Roses‘ (1941) the telephone deconstructs the habitually postulated opposition of authenticity vs. alienation. In ‚Fireworks‘, (1982) it indicates that the world is – at least partly – inexplicable. In ‚State of England‘, (1996) the mobile phone helps expose the cleft between the ideology of meritocracy and the reality this ideology helps create.