Today's topic is cell phones.
I grew up in an era before cell phones. Today I marvel at how we as a society survived.
Just a few minutes ago my husband called me to ask if he should pick up our youngest son since it was raining. He wondered if they'd still have track practice after school. Since I hadn't noticed it was raining and don't usually pick up the kids, I told him to call his son. Of course the logic there is flawed, because kids don't carry cell phones when they are running around a track in the rain. Or so one would hope.
Going back a few decades, I don't mind telling you that I had the benefit of being on the leading edge of the mobile phone phenomenon. When I worked in media relations for the utility company in the late 1980s, we had a car we would drive to sites away from corporate that had a phone in it. Our department also had a mobile phone that we traded between us depending on which of the three reps was on call. I don't mind telling you that, although the phone in the car was cool, that "mobile phone" was in retrospect a really funny thing.
If you watch old episodes of 1980s cop shows, you might see the type of phone I'm about to describe. It was very similar to the phones you also saw in war-era movies, like Vietnam or maybe even WWII era. The guys on the field had a big phone (ten inches at least) with a long antennae, and a huge battery pack that traveled with it. That's what our department phone was like. It came with a suitcase -- a very heavy suitcase -- that included the charger. The phone had a battery, but it didn't last long. The EMFs that came off the phone will probably be my demise in another 20 years, but at least I could talk to Channel 4 or a radio station from a restaurant on a Saturday night and explain a local power outage. Besides, having a mobile phone was way cool.
I bought my first cell phone -- a Motorola Flip Phone, remember those? In 1994. I was pregnant with my second child and felt I needed the security of having a cell phone. My husband had given me a mobile CD player for my birthday, but I returned it and bought that phone. It was so cool.
A year or so later I bought a BMW that had a cool car phone in it. We never hooked it up, but my by then toddlers loved to play with it and pretend we were in an airplane calling the tower.
Flash forward a decade or more and I now pay for five cell phones on a shared plan with bills so complicated I'd never understand them. All I know is that two out of three times I try to reach anyone whose phone I pay for I get their voice mail.
Not to mention that the new house we bought is in the country and the cell service here is abominable. We all have to go outside the house to get a decent signal, and our phones never ring. They go straight to voicemail. Even if we do connnect, we're roaming and we tend to lose the signal within ten minutes. It's helped all of us keep our chatting to a minimum and keeps me under my maximum minutes.
But what did we do before cell phones? How did we tell our spouse to pick up milk or tell the kids we were running late? How did mothers get their kids to meet them in the drive to carry in groceries? I guess they had to go inside and yell for the kids. I find the cell phone much more civilized.
At the same time, I liked it back before clients or employers knew how to reach you if you weren't around. I liked it when people wouldn't dream of calling me at home or late at night. They wouldn't expect me to pick up a call or retrieve a message and return a call on a Saturday morning. In the era of cell phones, there's no excuse for being out of touch.
Now I remember what I did before cell phones. I focused on my driving, listened to more music, and didn't dally to my destinations. I worried about being on time because there was no time to stop and find a pay phone. I returned missed calls because the people really did miss me, not because I had avoided them the first time around. I legitimately got back to people the next day, rather than feeling guilty for holding off until then.
I also didn't pay thousands of dollars every year for the privilege of being reachable 24/7. I'm not sure what I did with all that money I saved, but I think those were easier times. Phone calls used to be cherished things (remember "Reach out and touch someone...") not requirements.
Now I do like text messaging, and I find that to be the best way to reach my kids. In fact, I can sit in my living room and say, "Dylan, Dylan, DYLAN" and get no answer from my son's room. But if I text him a message saying, "Dylan, please come here," he'll usually respond. Oftentimes with a message that says "Y?" But at least I'm communicating with my kids.
Ah, technology. It really is a marvelous thing.
