Thursday, February 19, 2009

Phoney

You know when I grew up EVERYBODY had a phone in their house. As a kid I started talking on the telephone at an early age and that was how I spent time with friends, my father who divorced and moved away, and as an early teen that was the first form of dating. Heavy breathing into a telephone in the darkest corner of the house as you hope the middle school girl on the other doesn't notice you are so excited just from the sound of her voice you have start breathing through your mouth just to keep you body oxygenated. Also... all the blood left your brain for another part of your body... but that was NOT the fault of the telephone. That was hormones and THAT is how they are supposed to work at that age.

And NO I do not still phone school girls and breath heavily through my mouth while afraid to say anything more wordy that "Cool" for fear they will think I am a loser. I have added the words "awesome and radical" to my repertoire of love.

So everybody had phones and some had two different lines. A Parents line and a kid's line. Then we started adding phones to the bedroom, the den, we put phones in the computer room and soon loud ringing filled the house whenever an incoming call came to the house. Life was good and all was well.

Then we got cell phones. Our land line phones that were located in every room had a loss of service that grew more and more pathetic until the service was dropped. Now we each have a phone. We each have a different number. So now I come in from a long day of work, I place the phone on a charger next to the computer and I go about cooking dinner, splitting atoms and saving the world on a daily basis, as I do every night. But suddenly, for the first time in my life the phone doesn't ring throughout the house when I get a call. My little phone buzzes or plays bagpipes (all my ring tones are bagpipes except for Mrs. Cris... who is the theme song from the Grinch) but I am off living life in another room and oblivious to the calls of others. Suddenly I have four phone lines, I pay over five times more a month for phone services and yet I am nearly unreachable.

2 comments:

Nina said...

And do you know anyone's numbers by heart should your phone up and die?

I sure don't.

But I can to this day remember my phone number growing up.

Weird.

Cris said...

I know a few numbers, none of the new ones. In fact I tried to dail (odd we call it dial when phones no longer even have dials) I tried to dial one of the offices I supervise the other other by memory.... evidently I don't know that one!

But my other still has the phone number she had when I was growing up. She still lives in the same house we moved into when I was four years old. In fact, up until a few years ago she still had the same old telephone she got when she moved in back in 1967. And yeah.. I can never forget that number.

As much as it all stayed the same... her address is different than it was when I grew up. Somehow it changed when they did all the 911 stuff.