Posted on Sun, Apr. 27, 2008
Where are you?
It's been a little over a year since we ditched our traditional land-line phone to go all cell all the time. It's saved money and made life simpler.
We're hardly the only folks to do it. The younger generation can't exactly grasp the concept of why anybody would have a land line in the first place.
The phone world has certainly changed a lot for me since I was a boy in the 1970s and a teenager in the 1980s.
In the 1970s, all I remember using are those old rotary phones. And at my house and my grandparents' homes, there was just one phone. One person could hog it for hours. Didn't really bother me because I didn't spend a lot of time on the phone then... or now for that matter. About the only time I'd have to talk on the phone in the 1970s is when my mom would call me to the phone with an order like, "Come tell Aunt Gladys thank you for those Spider-Man Underoos she sent you!"
That was always embarrassing. Although, I must say that those suckers have sure held up through the years. Must have been made when we actually produced things in America. They're a little snugger now.
One of my grandmothers lived in a tin house down a dirt road. I'd say it was the boonies, but you had to walk for miles just to get to the boonies. And in the boonies and those remote areas surrounding the boonies, they had a lot of party lines. And the only folks invited to the party out there were a couple of old ladies who fussed anytime I picked up the phone.
"Hold on, Bertha, somebody's listening to our conversation!"
And today's kids will never know the joys of those phone cords that were about 40 feet long, but only about three inches long when they inevitably got all twisted up. And you had to do that trick where you held the phone by the cord and gave it a spin. After about 500 revolutions, the cord was 40 feet long again. Of course, those long cords decapitated and strangled thousands of kids running through houses in the '70s.
Then came touch tones, which were fun to play with and see what kind of tunes you could create -- at least until your dad roared into the living room with the phone bill in his hand wanting to know who's been calling Goran in Czechoslovakia.
But the cell phone has brought the biggest change for us. The best thing is that we don't have to call 47 people to tell them when we're heading out of town. In fact, now when people call, the first thing they ask is, "Where are y'all?"
However, it definitely beats coming home from a weeklong vacation and finding an answering machine blinking 88 times, striking fear into you until you hear 87 ways you could consolidate your debt.
BLAWG WILD
For a video of a guy dancing in his underwear, see Chris Johnson's blog at http://blawgwild.blogspot.com
Contact Chris Johnson at 706-320-4403 or cjohnson@ledger-enquirer.com
