Of all the technological advances I’ve seen in my life, I’d have to say the evolution of the telephone is the one that fascinates me the most.
Very few people, especially those people under the age of, say, 30, use their telephone to make actual telephone calls. Instead, they use them for other things, such as texting, emailing, surfing the internet. Some people even watch TV on their phones.
I’m not immune of this evolution myself. My latest cell phone bill shows I made or received fewer than 30 phone calls last month. (And let’s be honest. Most of the incoming calls were telemarketers.) But I sent or received close to 300 text messages. I find it’s easier to text a friend rather than wonder if I’d interrupt them with a phone call.
It didn’t use to be that way. I am old enough to remember when the telephone was much different. For instance, we only had two phones in our house. One was in my mother’s bedroom. The other hung on the wall in the kitchen, and you couldn’t wander very far because the receiver was attached to the wall by a cord.
At our house, you could walk all the way across the kitchen to the sink, not the I ever thought about washing dishing while I was on the phone.
After a while, cordless phones were invented, and it was like magic. No longer were you tethered to that cord in the kitchen. You could walk around the house talking on the phone, if that’s what you wanted to do.
My brother and I decided to buy my mother a cordless phone for Christmas so she wouldn’t have to get up off the sofa and walk into the kitchen every time the phone rang.
We got it hooked up with a phone and cradle within arm’s reach of her on the sofa. Not long after we got everything set up, the phone rang. My mother got up, went into the kitchen and answered the phone.
Old habits die hard.
The other thing about the old days is that when a telephone rang, everyone dropped what they were doing to answer the phone. It didn’t matter what was going on. The phone call was more important.
Today, I don’t answer the phone unless it’s from a number I have in my contacts list. Otherwise, I just let it ring. If whatever the person is calling about is important enough, they’ll leave a message and I’ll call them back.
Of course, some people – like my brother – don’t listen to their messages. I once left a long, detailed message about something. A few minutes later, he called me back, but I had to repeat everything I had left in the message.
“Oh, I don’t listen to messages. I just saw the notification you called.”
OK.
I’m sorry I wasn’t alive back in the day when phones were like they were on “The Andy Griffith Show,” when you could just ask the operator to call whoever it was you wanted to talk to. Barney, of course, was always calling Juanita.
“Sarah, get me Juanita down at the diner,” he’d say.
I always chuckled when Andy wanted to call Aunt Bee.
“Sarah, get me my house.”
Of course, today, we have a similar way to make calls.
“Siri, call my mother.”
Ah, just like the good ol’ days.
