In 1978, Al Stewart released an album entitled Time Passages, part of the lyrics of which were:
Years go falling in the fading light
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight
While there has been much debate about what the lyrics actually meant, in my mind, it is a song lamenting the quick passage of the years.
It probably has never occurred to most of us that at some point in time, a portion of the then living populace lamented the fact that gaslights, fireplaces, wood stoves, blacksmiths – all once part of the daily life of people, faded into relative obscurity. Today, we view them as quaint or antique.
In my lifetime alone, we have seen the rise and fall of the LP Record, the Compact Disc, the 8-track tape, the phonograph player, AM-Radio, vacuum tubes, the Edsel and the Packard, and from this article in USA Today, apparently the home telephone is now going to be added to the list of quaint things we used to think we needed.
Most of todays under 30 crowd probably would not recognize the telephone that I grew up with.
My grandmother had one, that sat heavily on my grandfathers roll-top desk. It was an austere black bakelite, with a heavy metal dial ring that revolved ever so slowly. This was made even worse by the fact that in our little town, the primary exchange was “996”.
In the 1960’s, the telephone company provided you with a telephone. It came in one color, and one style, and you were not allowed to have more telephones than what the phone company allowed you to have. They were very strict. There was no such thing as a designer phone.
Later, “designer” phones became all the rage. Everyone wanted a “princess” phone. They came in various styles, some of them quite stylish for the times. You knew that you were in the home of someone with means if they had a princess phone.
Later, after the push-button pad replaced the dial, it was even more stylish to have a button-pad that lit up in the dark.
I had my first exposure to a cell phone in 1992 after hurricane Andrew flattened a good portion of Dade County, Florida. For miles around our office building just north of Homestead, there wasn’t anything taller than a fence post left standing, and telephone service was a dream that stood in line just behind the dreams we had of hot running water and electricity.
The company I worked for rented cell phones for several of us in management, so that we could communicate with each other and with the office. We were very proud of being entrusted with these things that cost $1,000 a month to lease and operate. We were cautioned to be very careful with the calls we made, as the per-minute charges could run to $5.00 a minute.
These things weighed in about 25 pounds apiece, and the batteries didn’t last terribly long. They also weren’t all that portable if I recall, unless you happened to also have a little red wagon that you could put the darn things in and pull them around behind you.
A few years later, we got newer cell phones that were much more portable. You still couldn’t exactly put them into a pocket, and there wasn’t anything at all that was very “smart” about them – in fact they had no memory at all, not even a last-number-redial function.
They also had a terrible battery life, but at the time, we considered them to be quite stylish, and a great improvement over the previous version. At least we no longer required the little red wagon to pull them around with.
My partner and I are resisting. We each have a cell phone, and we still have the “land” line installed in the house. We both have a rather laissez-faire attitude about our cell phones. I carry mine in a pocket most of the work day, but as soon as I get home, it goes into a basket on the kitchen counter, where I tend to mostly ignore it for the remainder of the day. If I hear it, I’ll pick it up, but more often than not, it chirps, hums and vibrates all by itself and gets no more attention than the birds out in the trees.
The landline however, demands attention. When it rings, it rings in at least 4 places throughout every level of the house, and cannot be ignored. Even though we have voicemail, we tend to drop whatever we are doing and rush after it like it is a toddler about to knock over a full glass of red wine. It is a silly reaction, but one that has become ingrained over a lifetime.
Apparently, in the next few years, having a landline, wired telephone in your home will mark you as decidedly old-fashioned, and in some places, may actually not even be possible as many state legislators are now passing laws that remove the requirements that telephone service providers provide service to all parts of a state.
I’ll miss it I suppose, just as my ancestors missed whatever item they had become accustomed to using, that got replaced by some new-fangled, unfriendly, hard-to-use item that didn’t work half as well as what it replaced.