Phone Moan

I saw a funny cartoon the other day--should have shared it on Facebook but didn't. Its caption said something like this: If earlier generations behaved with phones the way we do now. And it showed some people gathered around an old land-line telephone booth--just staring at it.

Oh my how Telephone Life has changed since my boyhood! Growing up in Oklahoma in the late 1940s and 50s, I remember some things like, well, "party lines." For a cheaper price you could share a phone line with someone else. So you could pick up the phone and hear other people talking.  Oops.

And when I picked up the phone in boyhood, an operator would say, "Number please." And I'd tell her (always a her). My grandmother's number in Enid was 5630-J (though it's possible this was our number; whatever--it's stuck with me).

If you wanted to call long distance, you'd tell the operator that was your intent. She (!) would call it for you, get an answer (or not), and then keep track of your time. (If you were at a pay phone, she would interrupt and tell you to drop in another quarter or whatever.)

The best thing; You could call collect--i.e., charge the call to the receiving party. This was great for me, early in my teaching career, when I was impecunious (to say the least). I always called my parents collect--and, bless them, they always accepted the charges.

A receiver of a collect call could refuse:

OPERATOR: I have a college call from Dan Dyer ... do you accept the charges?
PARENTS: No. [Never happened.]

I didn't get a fancy "dial" telephone for quite a while ...

When we got our first portable phone (in the 1970s?), Joyce and I would still sit on the little telephone table we'd acquired from her parents. We could have walked round the room We could have gone into the kitchen, Hell, we could have gone outside and talked.

But we didn't. We sat there as if it were 1950 and we could move only as far as the cord would allow.

Our son had a cell phone before we did. He was just out of college (1994), delivering pizza in the Boston area, waiting for some career (other than pizza-delivery) to open up. And he found a cell phone essential.

We thought it was a laughable extravagance.

When we finally bought our first one, we kept it in the car, had it "on" only when needed.

Then came smart phones. I had a couple of Blackberrys, now various generations of iPhones, Joyce was late to the smart-phone party (she had a flipper that she rarely turned on), but now she ignores me and reads her news feed. (I exaggerate--as I'm sure she'll understand!).

We still have a land line--not sure why. Loyalty? (Stupidity?) We get virtually no personal calls on it--robocalls and the like compose 99.99% of it.

And what's next?

Hard to say. We're already, each of us, walking around with a device with more computing capacity than that available to the moon-landers on July 20, 1969, Joyce's birthday. One of our first dates ...