A few months back, as I noticed a little message on my
smartphone screen that said something like “five missed calls,” I had a
momentary flash of nostalgia for the way telephones (and telephone etiquette)
used to be. As the smartphone rang
again, I ignored it and thought back to all of the changes…
My earliest recollection of a telephone was in the house I first
lived in on Red Arrow Highway. There was
one phone in the house, I think. It had
a rotary dial and a heavy receiver and it sat on the desk next to the dining
room table. Quaint, huh?
We moved to a new house in 1987. At the time we toured the house, before my
parents bought it, I remember seeing phone jacks in every single room. This, to me, was amazing. What was even more amazing our first cordless
phone, which we got that Christmas, I believe.
I’m sure I don’t remember the absolute first time I used it, but I remember
the pull out antenna, the channel selector button, and talking outside on a
telephone at my house. This, children of
today, never happened before. Not in the
Midwest, anyway. At least three people I
knew had that exact same phone. There
wasn’t a whole lot of variety in the beginning.
Sometime in the next few years, I saw my very first “car
phone.” We also called it a “bag phone.” This was because the phone was in a bag. It would plug into the car lighter for power
and, I think, had a battery that could last up to ten minutes or so if not plugged
in. That was the state of things for
awhile. Some cars, though, had built in
car phones. These were mostly Cadillac
sedans.
Middle School rolled around and I was on the Student Council. Many of my friends were involved in
after-school activities, as was I. A lot
of the activities, like Science Olympiad or scrounging around in the basement
of the building for god-knows-what, didn’t really have a solid end-time, so
getting rides set up was a pain. I
lobbied to get a payphone put into the school lobby so students could call home
when needed. It cost us, as I remember,
$120 out of our budget to get the phone installed. We had plenty of money then because we had
also, the previous year, installed the first pop machine in the school and the
Student Government took all the profits.
I recall this was the time when 1-800-COLLECT launched. One could dial that code and, when the
automated service asked for your name, you’d just say “Pick me up” and your
parents would come and get you.
Brilliant. Almost worth having to
put up with Carrot Top…
High School started with the bag phone getting scaled down
to a large handset that could be carried in the car. The term “cellular” telephone started being
used, but most folks I knew still called it a car phone, because why would you
carry it anywhere else but in a car?
Once I could drive, I started working. Once I started working, I fell in love. She lived in a different town 12 miles
away. That, my friends, was a LONG
DISTANCE phone call. Services like
TalkAmerica, providing free US Long Distance formed (along with a lot of
pyramid schemes). Soon, the “local long
distance” charges disappeared and I was free to talk to my girlfriend from a
landline telephone in my parents’ basement.
There’s this word I love: retronym. It is when an advance in something makes you
come up with a new name for the old type of that thing. Until there was an electric guitar, all were
just “guitars”, but the advance made the need for the term “acoustic guitar” to
be coined. The same is true for “landline
telephone.”
All was stable through college. We had one telephone in the house in
Kalamazoo. The phone number was
388-8193. I used to remember lots of
phone numbers. Anyway, it was a cordless
phone that lasted all four years. When I
needed to focus on studying, I could go in the basement of the house and
read. The phone stayed upstairs. Nobody was too upset when we didn’t connect
immediately.
I moved from Michigan to Pennsylvania in 2002. That year, I got my first cell phone. It was a good ol’ Nextel Brick. I was driving for third shift work in a dairy
out in what used to be the middle of nowhere, so the added security of a cell
phone felt good. I used it maybe ten
times the first year. The landline was
still the way to go. Though I would use
the “direct connect” feature to say hello to my Dad once in awhile.
I have had five cell phones total. The first two were Bricks. Then a flip phone. Those all lasted a long time. Somewhere in that flip phone era, for me, I migrated
away from having a landline. In that
same space, I started noticing a change in people. Since my phone was not a landline, not a “car
phone”, but could be carried on me at all times, it was pretty much expected
that it be on me at all times. Responses
taking more than a few hours were an insult.
Then in more than an hour. Then
the expectation with some was the need for instantaneous responses.
And here is where it was, as I sat with six missed calls on
the screen of my smartphone from the same person. There were also five text messages, but that’s
another story.
"Dumbphone" is a retronym, too.
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