I have a sister who is almost exactly ten years younger than me (she was “The Surprise”). In her teen years, she got in trouble for running up $350 in long- distance charges calling a friend of hers in Indiana. Mom wasn’t too pleased about the bill, but she really couldn’t go too hard on her; from the time my sister was old enough to use a phone she’d always had a mobile phone available. She knew that her mobile plan had limited minutes, and that the landline didn’t. The concept that it might cost more to call someone whose phone number had a different area code using a landline didn’t even enter into her head (why would it?) So…she called her friend on the landline to save minutes while talking for hours, as teenagers tend to do.
Well…or as teenagers used to tend to do, anyway. It’s probably all SMS now.
When I think about this, I think about my kids. I think about the things that I grew up with that they’ll never know. An interestingly high percentage of these things are phone-related.
Nostalgia is the mental state of remembering when things were simultaneously better and worse - or perhaps better by virtue of being worse. I think about how my kids will likely never lay hands on a rotary dial telephone, never understand “it takes forever to dial your aunt, she’s got all those 8s and 9s in her number.” They’ll never know what it’s like to have to stay in one room to use the phone, or conversely to have a 40-yard-long curly-coiled trip line for booby trapping your house while you chat. They’ll understand battery life and signal, for sure, but won’t have to worry about not being able to use the cordless phone when the power is out.
But the one I probably think about the most is the pen cup - the cup full of writing instruments that sits next to the phone. The pens are for writing down other peoples’ phone numbers on physical media, typically a little book stuffed full of business cards and post-it notes kept somewhere in the vicinity of the cup. There are about 40 pens jammed into the cup, and assuming you select a pen at random (and don’t go fishing for The Good One) you’ve got about a 1-in-3 chance of getting a pen that has no ink. When this happens, protocol demands that you stuff that pen back right back down in the cup and grab another, repeating the process until you find a pen that works. You may optionally curse and grumble about “none of these pens ever work when I need one.”
Man.
Those were the days.